Aleah Finnegan is excited to head back home to the Philippines following her Olympic debut in the Paris Summer Games.

The 21-year-old Fil-Am made her biggest competition count despite dismal results in the women’s all-around of the artistic gymnastics in the 2024 Paris Summer Games where she landed in 47th place.

Finnegan, along with Emma Malabuyo and Levi Jung-Ruivivar couldn’t make it past the qualifiers but was among the 22 brave Filipino bets who fought for glory in the Philippines’ 100th year of Olympic participation.

With that alone, Finnegan, who flew back to her hometown of Louisiana, shortly after the conclusion of her Olympic campaign, is coming back to the Philippines to celebrate with the rest of her fellow Filipino athletes-–both triumphant and reeling from loss but either way beaming with pride. 

“My grandmother and a few of my mom’s brothers still live in the Philippines. So we’re gonna go later this week to go visit them and to attend some events that are going on post-Olympic, and celebrate everything that has happened in the past few weeks cause they’ve been pretty insane,” Finnegan said in a TikTok video.

In it, Finnegan also proudly recalled how she made her switch from the United States to representing the Philippines in 2022, owing the privilege to her Filipina mother.

“Excited to visit the Philippines, I went last summer and the summer before that. Before that, I was still very little. So it’s kind of been a long time since then,” she said.

Though coming back empty-handed from the women’s side, the Philippines remains a country proud of its best ever finish in the Olympics following golden boy Carlos Yulo’s historic two gold medals in the floor exercise and vault apparatus of the men’s artistic gymnastics.