Shannon Miller

Not to be confused with Shannon Miller (ice hockey).

Shannon Miller
Miller in Fort Myers, Florida in July 2015
Personal information
Full name	Shannon Lee Miller
Born	(1977-03-10) March 10, 1977 Rolla, Missouri, U.S.
Hometown	Edmond, Oklahoma, U.S.
Height	5 ft (152 cm)
Gymnastics career
Discipline	Women's artistic gymnastics
Country represented	United States
Level	Senior international elite
Club	Dynamo
Former coach(es)	Steve Nunno, Peggy Liddick
Retired	August 20, 2000
Medal record International gymnastics competitions Event 1st 2nd 3rd Olympic Games 2 2 3 World Championships 5 3 1 Pan American Games 4 1 0 Total 11 6 4 Women's gymnastics Representing United States Olympic Games 1996 Atlanta Team 1996 Atlanta Balance Beam 1992 Barcelona All Around 1992 Barcelona Balance Beam 1992 Barcelona Team 1992 Barcelona Uneven Bars 1992 Barcelona Floor Exercise World Championships 1993 Birmingham All Around 1993 Birmingham Uneven Bars 1993 Birmingham Floor Exercise 1994 Brisbane All Around 1994 Brisbane Balance Beam 1991 Indianapolis Team 1991 Indianapolis Uneven Bars 1994 Dortmund Team 1995 Sabae Team Goodwill Games 1994 St Petersburg Balance Beam 1994 St Petersburg Floor Exercise 1994 St Petersburg All-Around 1994 St Petersburg Vault 1994 St Petersburg Uneven Bars Pan American Games 1995 Mar del Plata Team 1995 Mar del Plata All Around 1995 Mar del Plata Uneven Bars 1995 Mar del Plata Floor Exercise 1995 Mar del Plata Vault

Shannon Lee Miller (born March 10, 1977) is an American former artistic gymnast. She was the 1993 and 1994 world all-around champion, the 1996 Olympic balance beam champion, the 1995 Pan American Games all-around champion, and a member of the gold medal-winning Magnificent Seven team at the 1996 Olympics.

Miller is the most decorated U.S. female gymnast in Olympics history with a total of seven medals. With a combined total of 16 World Championships and Olympic medals between 1991 and 1996, she is the second-most decorated American gymnast, male or female, behind Simone Biles. She was also the most successful American athlete at the 1992 Olympics, winning five medals.

Early life

Miller was born in Rolla, Missouri, but she and her family moved to Edmond, Oklahoma, when she was six months old. She began gymnastics when she was five and traveled to Moscow with her mother at the age of nine to participate in a gymnastics camp.

As a teenager, Miller attended Edmond North High School, working with a flexible program that accommodated her training, travel and competition schedule.

Miller's mother was a bank vice president, and her father was a professor at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Gymnastics career

1989–1991

For most of her career, Miller was coached by Steve Nunno and Peggy Liddick, who went on to become the national coach of the Australian women's gymnastics team.

As a 12-year-old, she finished third at the 1989 Olympic Festival, a competition designed to showcase up-and-coming talent.

She traveled to Europe in 1990 and 1991 for international meets and scored perfect 10s on the balance beam at the Swiss Cup and the Arthur Gander Memorial. At the 1991 Gander Memorial, she won the all-around with the highest total score ever recorded by an American woman under the traditional 10.0 scale: a 39.875. (Kim Zmeskal earned the same total at the 1990 USA vs. USSR Challenge.)

At her first World Championships in 1991 in Indianapolis, Miller won two silver medals: one on the uneven bars (where she tied with Soviet gymnast Tatiana Gutsu) and one in the team competition. She placed second to Soviet Svetlana Boginskaya during the compulsory portion of the competition.

1992

Due to injury, Miller missed the 1992 World Championships in Paris. Not quite back up to speed with her more difficult skills, she pulled out of the optionals competition at the National Championships and petitioned to the Olympic Trials. Although the result was controversial, Miller won the Trials over her rival, Zmeskal, who was the 1991 world champion.

Miller won the compulsory portion of the 1992 Olympic Games and scored the highest of any gymnast in the overall team competition, securing the bronze medal for the US women's team and advancing to the all-around final as the top-ranked gymnast in the world. In the all-around final, she missed out on the gold by the closest margin in Olympic history, finishing 0.012 points behind Gutsu. Her coach, Steve Nunno, claimed she was robbed of the gold medal by unfair judging.

In event finals, she captured three more individual medals: a silver on balance beam and bronzes on uneven bars and floor exercise. Her haul of five Olympic medals was more than that of any other American athlete in Barcelona. She was one of only two female gymnasts, along with Lavinia Miloşovici of Romania, to compete in every event final at the Games, and she alone performed all sixteen of her routines without serious error. Thirteen of her routines scored a 9.9 or higher, with her lowest score being a 9.837 in the vault final.

With her two silver and three bronze medals at the 1992 Summer Olympics, Miller holds the record for most medals won at a single Olympic Games without winning gold.

Miller was robbed of gold in 1992. Nellie Kim gave her a 9.9 but gave Boginskaya a 10.00) as well as Hungry and Great Britain which made her average only a 9.925 even though she scored higher in every other part of the competition ( 9.950 in team finals. and a  9.962 in the event finals) Miller also was lowballed by the vault judges for a perfect vault. Romanian judge only gave her a 9.9 because she was competing against Lavinia for gold, blatantly cheating.

1993

At the 1993 World Championships in Birmingham, Miller won every event in preliminaries, and television commentator Kathy Johnson, a 1984 Olympian, remarked that she had not seen a gymnast so dominant since Nadia Comăneci in 1976. Bart Conner agreed, stating that Miller could only be beaten if she faltered. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, its sports system had undergone upheaval, and most former Soviet gymnasts were not ready to mount a sustained challenge in 1993. Miller, on the other hand, had reworked her routines to comply better with the new Code of Points. She won the all-around title, followed by gold medals on bars and floor. However, she fell three times in the beam final and withdrew from the vault final due to illness.

1994

At the 1994 World Championships in Brisbane, Miller again took the all-around title, beating Miloşovici and becoming the first American gymnast to win back-to-back world all-around titles. She also won the beam title, which had eluded her the previous year, with a near-perfect exercise.

Her winning streak ended in late 1994 at the Goodwill Games, where Dina Kochetkova of Russia, who had finished in third place at the World Championships, defeated her by a narrow margin, 39.325 to 39.268. Miller rebounded by earning gold medals on beam and floor and silver medals on vault and bars. She missed out on medals in the team competition and the mixed team competition, both of which saw fourth-place finishes for the United States.

Two weeks later, Miller competed at the 1994 National Championships, where she won five silver medals, placing second to Dominique Dawes each time.

1995

Although she won the 1995 American Classic, Miller lost the 1995 National Championships to 13-year-old Dominique Moceanu. At the 1995 World Championships in Sabae, Japan, she amassed the highest total score of the American team but walked away without an individual medal. She placed seventh on the uneven bars and fourth on the balance beam, and had to withdraw from the vault and floor finals due to injury.

1996

File:Atlanta 96 Gold - Copy.jpg

The gold medal won by Miller at the 1996 Summer Olympics

Although struggling with severe tendinitis in her left wrist and a pulled hamstring, Miller won the 1996 National Championships. Once again, though, she was forced to sit out the World Championships in the Olympic year due to injury, and later the Olympic Trials. She was able to petition onto the American team as the top performer at Nationals, and the injury was sufficiently recovered by July to allow her to compete in her second Olympics.

Miller led the American team, dubbed the Magnificent Seven, to the gold medal, defeating the Russians. Kerri Strug garnered the majority of the media attention after landing her second vault on an injured foot, which forced her to withdraw from the all-around and event finals. But Miller, who was the team's highest scorer, placed second after the team competition behind Lilia Podkopayeva, qualifying her for her second Olympic all-around final.

In the all-around, Miller was ranked second halfway through the competition. In the end, she placed eighth, but was the highest-ranking American in the competition. She also became the first American to win the balance beam final at the Olympics, as well as the first American woman to win an individual gold medal at a non-boycotted Olympics. She concluded her career with seven Olympic medals.

1997–2000

Following the Olympics, Miller and her teammates participated in a 100-city tour and several exhibitions. She competed in her final international meet in 1997, when she won the all-around title at the World University Games.

In 2000, Miller made a brief comeback attempt for the Sydney Olympics. She competed in the Olympic Trials, but after a fall on vault, she decided to withdraw from the competition despite being cleared by a doctor to continue.

Honors

Miller is a member of the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame, the [[United States Olympic Hall of Fame the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame, and the Women's International Sports Hall of Fame. She is the only woman, in any sport, to be inducted into the United States Olympic Hall of Fame twice, as an individual and for her team.

With seven Olympic and nine World Championship medals, Miller is one of the most decorated American gymnasts, male or female. She is tied with Nastia Liukin for third most World Championship medals (9) won by an American gymnast, behind Simone Biles (20) and Alicia Sacramone (10).

In 1998, the Oklahoma Legislature named a section of Interstate 35 in Edmond, Oklahoma the Shannon Miller Parkway in her honor.

Post-gymnastics career

In 2003, Miller graduated from the University of Houston with a B.B.A. in marketing and entrepreneurship. She entered Boston College Law School later that year and graduated in 2007. Afterward, however, she opted not to take the bar exam. She moved to Florida, where she made appearances at gyms, conducted beam clinics, and starred in workout DVDs.

Miller performing at the 2008 Tour of Gymnastics Superstars in San Jose, California.

On October 21, 2015, Miller entered a business partnership with Juice Plus for a branded line of dietary supplements. Also in 2015, her autobiography, It's Not About Perfect: Competing for My Country and Fighting for My Life, was published in 2015 by St. Martin's Press.

She is currently the president of Shannon Miller Lifestyle and the Shannon Miller Foundation, which is dedicated to fighting childhood obesity.

Personal life

Miller married lawyer and ophthalmologist Christopher B. Phillips in June 1999. The couple separated in 2004, and their divorce was finalized in 2006. While Phillips accused Miller of infidelity with a married male athlete, Miller denied the claim, and it did not figure into the divorce grounds.

In August 2007, Miller announced her engagement to John Falconetti, the president of Drummond Press and former chairman of the Republican executive committee of Duval County, Florida. They married on August 25, 2008, and have two children: a son, John Rocco, born on October 28, 2009, and a daughter, Sterling Diane, born on June 25, 2013.

In February 2011, Miller revealed that she had been diagnosed with germ cell ovarian cancer, a month after doctors removed a baseball-sized cyst from one of her ovaries. She underwent three cycles of chemotherapy from March 7 to May 2, 2011. In September 2011, her doctor gave her a clean bill of health.

Competitive history

Year	Event	Team	AA	VT	UB	BB	FX
1988	U.S. Classic (junior)		2nd
1989	U.S. Classic (junior)		1st
	U.S. Olympic Festival		3rd
1990	American Classic		2nd
	U.S. Classic		2nd
	Swiss Cup Zürich					1st
1991	U.S. Classic		2nd
	U.S. National Championships		7th	3rd		1st
	American Cup					1st
	Arthur Gander Memorial		1st
	DTB Cup		3rd
	Swiss Cup		1st
	World Championships	2nd			2nd
1992	American Cup		3rd	1st	1st	1st
	International Mixed Pairs		1st
	Olympic Trials		1st
	Olympic Games	3rd	2nd	6th	3rd	2nd	3rd
1993	U.S. National Championships		1st	2nd	1st	3rd	1st
	American Cup		1st	1st	1st		1st
	World Championships		1st		1st	8th	1st
1994	U.S. National Championships		2nd	2nd	2nd	2nd	2nd
	World Championships		1st	7th		1st	4th
	Team World Championships	2nd
1995	American Classic		1st
	U.S. National Championships		2nd	1st			3rd
	World Championships	3rd	12th		7th	4th
1996	U.S. National Championships		1st
	Olympic Games	1st	8th	8th		1st
1997	International Mixed Pairs		3rd
	Summer Universiade	2nd	1st		4th
2000	Olympic Trials		13th

See also

• List of multiple Olympic gold medalists at a single Games
• List of Olympic female gymnasts for the United States
• List of Olympic medal leaders in women's gymnastics
• List of top female medalists at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships

External links

• "Shannon Miller Lifestyle". Archived from the original on 2011-02-01. Retrieved 2011-02-25.
• Shannon Miller at the International Gymnastics Federation
• Where Are They Now?: Shannon Miller Info & Photos