On Sunday afternoon, the official team account put out a teaser. A figure in the darkness. Audio playing with the voices of gym commentators John Roethlisberger and Alicia Sacramone Quinn talking about being one of the best in the country on a particular event. Hmmmm…
By Sunday night, the gymternet started asking questions.
“IS THIS HELEN HU????????? PLEASE I NEED TO KNOW NOWWWWW.”
ARE WE GETTING HELEN HU BACK?????? OH MY GOD.”
“NO WAY IS THIS HELEN HU OH MY GOD?!”
“WHAT WHAT WHAT PLEASE LET IT BE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE”
And so many more. In all caps. That harmless lil’ hype video had gone viral.
And then on Monday morning at 9am, as promised, the news arrived.
HELEN HU IS BACK.
If you aren’t interested in hearing how I came to find this out weeks ago, feel free to skip the next few paragraphs and to what this means, lineups, and all that stuff.
If you’re still with me, here goes.
Back in mid-August, Shannon Welker responded to an email I sent him with the statement, “We have one more surprise for Gym World. Stay tuned.” I know, I know, super detailed. So every time my twitter notifications went off for the past TWO months, I wondered, is THIS the news?!? Is it scheduling? Is it a recruiting coup? Is one of the major 2025ers joining the team early? The latter is kinda what my gym friends had decided upon, as scheduling, unless it’s something wild like welcoming in UCLA and we get to see Jordan Chiles, just doesn’t seem “Gym World-ly”, and as hard as I tried to get “HEZ to MIZ” happen, it just wasn’t picking up steam and now Hezly Rivera is going to be wearing Tiger stripes of another color. Awkward…
I came upon this top-secret information purely by coincidence as it was a case of someone (not me, actually) being in the right place at the right time. I was sitting at my desk at the J-School, minding my own business and working very diligently on Wednesday, September 25 around 8:30am, when a **ping** sounded in Microsoft Teams from a J-School professor, [redacted]. “Are you here? Go outside. Or look out your window? Mizzou Gym was just shooting their poster in the amphitheater!” it said. I didn’t see anything from the window and so I ran outside to the concrete structure outside of Reynolds Journalism Institute that’s not easily visible to passersby (quite sneaky in retrospect to shoot there)— but the team was gone already. Sadness.
