Who? It’s Horton in a runaway at US gymnastics championships

Horton romps to first national gymnastics title

DALLAS — When medals are on the line over the next four years, Jonathan Horton wants to be the man everybody looks to.

After winning his first national gymnastics title, it’s hard to imagine looking anywhere else.

“I’ve wanted that role my whole career,” Horton said.

He played it to perfection Friday night, winning the U.S. championships in a runaway, with 181.9 points, 3.4 better than Tim McNeill and 3.9 ahead of Wes Haagensen.

Defending national champion David Sender, who led most of the first night, had a rough second day and finished 10th.

Horton adds this championship to his Olympic silver medal on high bar and a fourth-place finish in the all-around at 2007 worlds.

In his mind, though, the work is only beginning.

He didn’t give himself good grades for most of this meet, in large part because he has only jumped back into serious, everyday training over the last three weeks, after a year that included graduating from Oklahoma, getting married to another Sooner gymnast, Haley DeProspero, and moving from Norman to Houston.

“I’m ecstatic with what I did,” Horton said. “But I’ve got a long way to go if I want to keep up with the rest of the world and I know that.”

He knows all about these uphill climbs.

He was on the team that finished 13th at worlds in 2006, then part of the rebuilding project that helped the United States to a bronze medal in Beijing two years later. Now that Paul and Morgan Hamm are gone for good, Horton knows he’s under the microscope as the road to London in 2012 begins.

He didn’t disappoint over two solid days in Dallas.

The highlight of his night came, as usual, on the high bar, where he strung together three solid release moves and caught the bar cleanly each time.

This wasn’t the amped-up routine he put together in only three days to win the Olympic silver in Beijing — a rare retooling that showed how much winning really meant to him — but most of that routine figures to come back by the time world championships roll around in October.

For this week, solid and simple was more than enough. Good enough, in fact, that he didn’t even have to sweat his evening-closing pommel horse routine. It’s his weakest event, but he had nearly a 5-point lead by then, meaning he could have fallen off two or three times and still won the meet. (He did fall once, and scored only 12.15.)

Horton’s path was made easier thanks to the collapse of Sender, who led this meet through the first five events of qualifying Wednesday night. It had the makings of a fantastic story for the defending champion, who is heading off to vet school this weekend and wouldn’t have taken a spot on the world team if it had been offered to him.

Not a worry now, not after slipping off parallel bars on his mount, falling off the high bar and landing on his backside during floor exercise — a painful string of mistakes that dropped him out of the running before the evening was half over.

“I walked in here and looked around and had the sudden realization that this is the last time I’m doing this,” Sender said. “I was hoping that might raise the adrenaline and get me through it, but it sort of skewed the other way.”

ROPES AND MATS: Sender was selected to the men’s national team based on his 10th-place finish, which means he’s entitled to some funding and support. He’ll have to resign his position if he sticks with his plan to sit out the rest of the year. … The men’s coaches will select the gymnasts going to worlds Sunday, with Sasha Artemev, who missed this meet because of an injury, in the mix.