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Article written by Scott Cacciola and published in New Haven Register online 12/26/2004

Annia Hatch gymnastics picture

  WEST HAVEN — Touring the Greek Islands aboard a small cruise boat this summer, Annia Hatch lost herself in the clear blue of the Mediterranean Sea. She caught her reflection amid the ripples and thought about the events in her life that led to this moment.
  She grew up near the water in Cuba, where she spent her childhood cartwheeling across gymnastics mats, tumbling toward a far-flung dream. What followed were pieces of a script that could be made into a movie.
  There was her early brush with death, then her struggle with the Cuban government. There was her long-distance love affair and her departure from Havana. There was her retirement and her comeback. And there was the injury followed by the glory, wrapped in flashbulbs that showered her like confetti.
  Hatch’s whirlwind journey to Athens for the Olympic Games last summer captured the public’s attention. From the large Cuban community in Miami — which knows her as Orgullo, the pride of her people — to her neighbors in West Haven, everyone felt they could relate to at least part of her story; there was so much from which to choose.
  Her trip was finally complete when she found herself on a celebratory cruise with friends from the United States Olympic team. Hatch stared at the sea and remembered the two silver medals that represented so much more than second place.
  "For me," she said, "it was important to have that moment."
Hatch, the 2004 Hew Haven Register Sports Person of the Year, secured her place in Olympic history on Aug. 22, when she seized silver in the vault, her signature event. Catapulting off the apparatus and twisting through the air, Hatch stuck her landing on a left knee marred by four scars, the remnants of surgery that patched together the anterior cruciate ligament she had torn one year earlier.
  As wild cheers washed over her, Hatch jumped into the arms of her husband, Alan, who had guided her comeback after she spent five years away from competition. She started training again in 2001, motivated by a story her husband came across on the Internet about a former Cuban teammate who had returned to the sport after giving birth.
  But nobody anticipated that Hatch could win two medals, including silver in the team event. Few expected Hatch to even make the team. She was thought to be too old, at 26, to compete against teenage pixies who dart around like wind-blown leaves. She was too injured to recover in time. She was too stale, too rusty.
  She had won seven national championships in Cuba, but those days were long gone. And Hatch could understand the questions because she had dealt with them herself.
  In the summer of 2003, when she attempted a Tsukahara double-twist in practice just hours before the world championships, she landed in a crumpled heap, her left knee in shreds. She considered that the dream might be over, that there might not be enough time to recover for the Olympic trials in eight months. But she quashed her doubts and relied on her past.
  She recalled being rushed to the hospital when she was 12, her appendix having ruptured while competing for Cuba at a meet in Puerto Rico. She was close to death by the time doctors got to her. But she survived and endured nearly a year without gymnastics.
  For young Annia Portuondo, that was a particularly harsh form of torture. As Alan Hatch likes to say, "For Annia, gymnastics is like ice cream; there’s nothing more fun."
  So facing long hours of rehabilitation before the trials, Hatch leaned on the lessons of her youth. She could be tough, she could stay strong. She also considered the missed opportunities.
  Cuba had thwarted her last two shots at the Olympics. In 1996, she won bronze in the vault at the world championships, where she also happened to meet an American coach named Alan Hatch. But Cuban officials, citing a lack of funds, failed to file the proper paperwork to send her to the Olympics in Atlanta.
  Meantime, a friendship between Portuondo and Hatch grew. They corresponded by letter, fell in love and were married less than two years later. After Annia moved to the United States to be with her husband and attained citizenship, Cuba barred her from international competition for a year.
  It felt like the end of the line, so she retired, fully prepared to build her new life in West Haven. She and her husband opened Stars Elite Gymnastics Academy off Sawmill Road. She immersed herself in the language, taking classes at the University of New Haven and scolding her husband when he tried to speak to her in Spanish. English, she told him. How else would she learn?
  Hatch applied that same intensity to her comeback. After doctors repaired her knee, she mended her spirit. Each day of training felt like a year, the pressure building and the workouts grueling, then the selection committee made her the oldest member of the U.S. Olympic gymnastics team since 1964. She rewarded its faith.
"If I were putting together an Olympic anthology of remarkable human interest success stories, then Annia Hatch would be one of the top five," said Tim Daggett, a former Olympian and an analyst for NBC Sports. "How can you hear her story and not feel good?"
  For the past five years, Hatch has made her home in West Haven, a proud working-class community that has embraced her as one of its own. When she returned from Athens as the freshly minted feel-good story of the summer, thousands lined Campbell Avenue for a parade in her honor.
  "I’d be lying if I said it was difficult to put together," West Haven Mayor H. Richard Boyer Jr. said, "because everyone wanted to help and everyone wanted to be there."
  But in some ways, Hatch said, the past year has been bittersweet. She misses Cuba. When she visited friends in Miami recently, they told her that she now spoke Spanish with an unfamiliar accent. And she no longer dreams in Spanish; her dreams come in English.
  "Sometimes," she said, "you have to remember where you come from."
  Most of all, she said she misses her family, including the two step-brothers she has never met. When she was young, her mother worked at a large electricity company but quit her job to devote her life to her daughter, picking Annia up at school and carting her to competitions.
  Her family was unable to watch the Olympics because of power outages in Cuba. Hatch last visited in 2001, and now she worries about going back. The Cuban government does not recognize American citizens.
  "I really have to see and pray, and with any luck they allow you to come in and out," she said. "Some people say it might be easier now, because of the Olympics. But other people say, ‘Be careful, because you never know.’"
  She indicated that she has little interest in politics, or least in speaking about them. She prefers to talk about her passion for gymnastics and her hopes for giving the sport more visibility in Connecticut.
  "I work hard all my life," Hatch said, "but I came here and I didn’t sit down. I tried to move forward and people, I think, appreciate how much I work, say how they’re proud of me. I have such good friends here that helped me.
  "I feel American, and why not? If you don’t believe in the system, how can you live here? I had an opportunity, and I didn’t waste it. I took it."
  At her gym, Hatch sees young girls who climb the ropes up and down, young girls who tumble across the mat in a manic blur of pigtails and leotards. She sees some talent, loads of potential. She sees shades of herself, past and present — maybe even future.
  "I think I will stay involved with gymnastics as long as I have the interest or have a purpose," she said. "Everything that I do in life, I have to be 100 percent. And if I don’t see that it’s going to be 100 percent, then I move on. Right now, it feels right.
  "I’m not looking for another Olympics. But who knows, really?"