COLUMBIA, Mo. — It’s been a big week for Team USA at the 2023 Artistic Women’s Gymnastics Championships in Belgium.
Simone Biles has officially made history by breaking her own record and taking home her sixth World Championship All-Around gold medal, and Team USA won its historic seventh consecutive World Championship title.
Mid-Missouri judge Shari Mann was a part of this magic. Mann was a floor and bars judge at what’s known as the World Championships selection camp. This is when the selection committee chooses which U.S. gymnasts get to compete at Worlds, which means she scores athletes like Simone Biles, Overland Park native Leanne Wong, and more.
“Watching Simone come back from her break and perform the way she did was just phenomenal,” Mann said. “Leanne Wong hit 18 for 18 routines in the competitions leading up to the World Championships. Just to get a front row seat to watch some awesome gymnastics is just amazing.”
But Mann has a story of her own with gymnastics. She fell in love with the sport at a young age.
“Olga Korbut, early 70’s,” she said. “I watched her in the Olympics, and I was like, I want do that.”
So, Mann’s mom enrolled her in gymnastics. From there, she soared. She received a gymnastics scholarship to Arizona State University. She then went on to earn a spot on the national team and then the World Championship team in 1981 in Russia.
“I love gymnastics. It has been a great run for me,” Mann said.
In 2010, she and her husband Jonathan Liddle moved to Columbia, Missouri, where they opened their own gym called Authority Gymnastics. When she’s not traveling across the world to judge the world’s greatest athletes, she’s coaching some of mid-Missouri’s most promising athletes alongside her husband.
“I think it’s pretty cool that I’ve come full circle,” she said.
But Mann never imagined her childhood love would take this kind of stage.
“I knew that I would own a gym so that I could share my passion with younger students," Mann said. "I did not think I would be judging Simone Biles, Leanne Wong, the very best athletes in the world.”
If gymnastics were a superhero, Shari Mann is the hero.
Mann will also leave for Chile in mid-October to judge another round of Olympic hopefuls at the Pan American Games.
