(Enlarge) Elise Ray, a coach at Carroll Gymnastics, in Hampstead, was a member of the 2000 U.S. Olympics gymnastics team that competed in Sydney, Australia. Next month, she and her teammates will receive a bronze medal due to the recent ruling that the Chinese team in 2000 had an underage member. (File photo)

On Aug. 11, Carroll Gymnastics coach Elise Ray will be awarded an Olympic bronze medal -- one she should have received at the 2000 Summer Olympics, in Sydney, Australia.

She and her teammates are receiving it now because, this past spring, age caught up with China's Dong Fangxiao.

Dong helped China win a bronze medal in the gymnastics team competition at the games.

Ray and the U.S. gymnastics team placed fourth and came home without a single medal.

In a statement regarding the belated medal, Ray said, "I am a still a little in shock and digesting the news.

"A lot of people don't know how hard it was, our whole Olympic experience," she said. "We have been looked at as a disappointment since 2000, so this is a chance for everyone to remember that we were, in fact, a great team."

After those Olympics, Ray attended the University of Michigan, where she graduated in 2005 with an English degree.

After that, she performed for a period in Las Vegas with Cirque du Soleil. She currently teaches gymnastics with the Hampstead-based Carroll Gymnastics, which works out of the Four Seasons Complex.

The U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Gymnastics announced June 23 that Ray and her teammates -- Dominique Dawes, Kristen Maloney, Jamie Dantzscher, Tasha Schwikert and Amy Chow -- will receive their bronze medals in a special ceremony Aug. 11 at the 2010 Visa Gymnastics Championships, in Hartford, Conn.

In late April, the International Olympic Committee decided the Chinese team would be stripped of its bronze medals for using an underage gymnast: Dong.

Olympic gymnasts must be 16. Dong's Olympics credentials indicated she was born Jan. 20, 1983, which made her eligible to compete. More recent documentation shows she was really 14 during the Sydney games.

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