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Alyssa RoenigkGAME
Defending NCAA all-around gymnastics champion Trinity Thomas of the University of Florida earned the 28th perfect 10 of her career on Saturday, surpassing the 27-year-old record set by Jenny Hansen of Kentucky on in 1996 and equaled UCLA’s Jamie Dantzscher in 2004.
Thomas earned a vault score in the NCAA championships in Fort Worth, Texas, and after weeks of speculation about whether she would play again after this season due to the right leg injury she sustained encountered in the Region last month.
“I didn’t focus on [the record] nothing,” Thomas said in a televised interview after the meeting, “I’m just focused on getting out of here one last time with my team. We left it all out there on the floor and I couldn’t be more proud of us.”
Thomas hasn’t trained in two weeks since the Regionals, but just before the game, Florida added Thomas to its bar and vault lineup for Thursday’s semifinals. She was near-perfect on her return to the bar, landing a stuck landing in doubles and getting a 10 from a judge and a total score of 9,950. Later in the meet, she scored 9.90 on vault with a small jump on landing and helped the Gators qualify for Saturday’s final.
Saturday, she made history. Competing in fifth place in Florida’s third spin and with the Gators trailing Oklahoma, the defending champion, Thomas made a stuck landing on the Yurchenko bunker 1½ to claim a perfect 10. first meeting. After greeting the judges, she ran to her team and hugged and high-fived her teammates and coach with tears in her eyes. When her score was announced, the crowd exploded in celebration. Thomas competed in just two events again on Saturday, winning 9,9125 on the bar in the final routine of her career.
“I don’t even know how to summarize [my career]”, she said. “It was the best time of my life. This fifth year is so lucky and I will miss gymnastics so much.”
Thomas and the second-placed Gators finished second in the championship final, 0.15 points behind the top-ranked Sooners.
Throughout this season, Thomas said she’s focused on the team’s accomplishments, including helping Florida win its first national championship since 2015 rather than an all-time 10-year-old record. “I’m back for this team,” Thomas said in a television interview after Thursday’s semi-final. “We are very special and I hope you can feel it even from the outside.”
Wrapping up an extraordinary senior season in which she won the NCAA all-round, floor and uneven bar titles and earned a perfect 12 points – the second-best all-time in a season tournament – Thomas announced she will return to the Gators as a senior superstar, choosing to use the fifth year of eligibility offered to athletes whose 2020 and 2021 seasons were shortened due to the pandemic , while studying for a Master’s degree in health and behavioral education. One of the most coveted records in college gymnastics, which Hansen and Dantzscher hit for four seasons, seems to be within her grasp.
Olympic (or elite) gymnastics discontinued the 10-point scale in 2007, but the “perfect 10” never left college gymnastics. Along with the rise of Olympic gymnasts entering college programs, the 10-point scale is often credited for the popularity of NCAA gymnastics. UF coach Jenny Rowland told ESPN earlier this year: “People are drawn to NCAA gymnastics because they know what a perfect 10 is like. “And they always will be.”
Thomas opened the season by taking her 21st perfect 10 on the bar and scoring at least one perfect 10 on each device — so-called “exercise competition” — from January 6 to March 19, when she scored two 10s in the SEC championship.
Thomas finished his college career with a perfect 12 on the floor, six on the bar, five on the bar and five on the vault.
