Happy birthday to the marvelous Morgan Hurd! A world champion who has inspired many other girls around the world. Not only she is a fabulous gymnast, one of those rare talented athletes that perfectly combines artistry with difficulty, she has a passion for reading and has professed her love for the Harry Potter books.
Morgan was born in China in 2001 and was adopted by an American family when she was just 11 months old. She started gymnastics when she was only 3 years of age, which provided her with the technique and foundation to become a natural gymnast if she had the necessary talent. And boy did she show talent. As a junior, she was doing difficult skills (such as a full-twisting double back piked flip on floor) that no other gymnasts in her category could do, and in 2017, her first year as a senior, she became the all-around gymnastics world champion, which is the most important title in gymnastics after the Olympic competition.
Having started 2020 winning the American Cup, Morgan was all set to go to the Tokyo Olympics that year, and then, just one week after the American Cup, many countries in the world started going into lockdown due to the spread of Covid-19. Competitions around the world were canceled, and the big blow came when the Olympic Games were postponed until 2021. When the lockdown in the US forced many gymnasts to stop training, Morgan had taken some equipment from her gym home, so she could do some conditioning while she couldn't go to the gym and when the lockdown was lifted, she recovered her previous form pretty quickly. However, she had to undergo several elbow surgeries around mid-March 2021, and she couldn't build up her strength in time for the US competitions that would qualify her to attend the US Olympic trials, so she will not be competing in the Tokyo Olympics. Morgan continues to train, and she will be attending and competing for the University of Florida in 2022.
@spaminator , It is with great sadness that I have to write these lines. Since today is my favorite gymnast Morgan Hurd's birthday, I wrote this heartfelt short article that I posted on Hive before posting it on Steemit (so far, I have not posted this article anywhere else). I couldn't care less about monetizing this content here on Hive, but it is really annoying when something that I wrote myself, without copying or taking ideas from anybody else, gets marked as spam. In fact, the very own definition of spam is what the @spaminator account does, that is, sending unsolicited messaging, or voting in this case, without even reading the article or text that it is marking as spam. It is for things like this that, sadly, Hive will never attract too many users, because nobody wants to be flagged as spam incorrectly. What is considered interesting content anyway? In some instances, just one photo with a two-word caption below is engaging for many readers. I publish my own videos, often with just one line of text to go with them, but when I feel like the video needs commentary, I write longer articles. This is not my main platform to publish content in, so I usually wouldn't be bothered about receiving incorrect downvotes, but, when it comes to giving visibility to my favorite gymnast, who will not even be in Tokyo (if you had bothered to read the article, you would understand), it is really insulting, not to me, but to the gymnast I'm trying to offer a tribute to.