Hezly Rivera, the youngest Team USA member at the Paris Olympics, can now call herself an Olympic champion.
"This was such an amazing experience and just being with the team to support them meant the world to me," Rivera said just after receiving her gold medal. "It was so surreal you know. My mind was everywhere. I am so happy to be here and this team has worked so hard."
When Rivera sat down for an interview with NBC 5 in March, at her home gym of WOGA-Plano, she said it was her dream to go to an Olympics. She said she had been training her entire life for this moment.
She said she balances six hours of training daily with school to make Team USA.
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She said she still can’t believe that in 2021, she was sitting at her house and in the gym watching the Tokyo Olympics, saying she wanted to be on that team. She wanted to one day be teammates with a gymnast that she has always looked up to and now the most decorated gymnast of all time, Simone Biles. That moment has now arrived.
“I could not have imagined that and I am just so excited and never would have thought that would have happened. Bars and beam are what I can contribute to the team. So when I hit bars and beam I knew that I had a shot,” Rivera said.
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While Rivera was not in the finals rotation, she competed in the Team USA preliminaries.
“I am so grateful to be here and to be selected on this Olympic team. I have made so many sacrifices to get here so I want to thank God, my coaches, family, my friends and my teammates. I just can’t believe that I am here,” Rivera told NBC DFW after making the team.
Her parents moved their family from New Jersey to Plano so that she could train at a world-class gym, because her parents said they believed in her that much.
“We couldn’t be happier," her dad Henry Rivera said before the competition began. "What an amazing accomplishment. Making the team is the most important thing, but being the youngest athlete, that’s something and you can never take that away from her. It means the world. It means the world to her, so it means the world to us,"
He talked about the decision to move his family from New Jersey to Plano so Hezly could train at WOGA-Plano.
“This was the outcome we always envisioned, so for us, this is just the beginning,” Rivera said.
Her childhood dream came true at the Paris Olympics.
