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Profile in CourageIn a competition marked by drama, emotion and, finally, heroism, the American women won their first team gold medal, defeating the talented Russiansby E.M. Swift
There are images that endure and eventually define the Olympic Games,
images whose light outlasts the madness and hullabaloo. Years from now
millions will still remember 18-year-old Kerri Strug, her left foot
gingerly raised, hopping to acknowledge first one set of judges and then
the other before collapsing in pain, frustration and tears.
In her moment of triumph, Strug was reduced to tears by the pain of her injury.
photograph by
They'll remember Bela Karolyi, the coach who had told Strug that the
team needed one more vault, carrying her onto the stand for the medal
ceremony, her ankle, with two torn ligaments, protected by a temporary
cast. Once there Strug, her face a mask of conflicting emotions,
collected with her beaming teammates the first gymnastics team gold
medal ever won by the American women.
That it was the unsung Strug who found herself in the hero's role on
July 23, rather than one of her more heralded, equally deserving
teammates, was, well, a delicious reminder that the lore of the Games is
created by the games themselves, not by the media or the promoters. Had
Strug's 14-year-old teammate Dominique Moceanu, vaulting immediately
before her, not fallen on both of her attempts, Strug's extraordinary
act of courage wouldn't have been necessary or, probably, permitted. "I
saw Dom fall the first time," Strug says, "and I thought, I can't
believe it. Then she fell a second time, and it was like time stopped.
The Russians, I knew, were on the floor, which can be a high-scoring
event, and my heart was beating like crazy. I thought, This is it,
Kerri. You've done this vault a thousand times."
Until Moceanu's twin gaffes, the U.S. women had been virtually
mistake-free through seven rotations of the team competition. Two days
earlier, in the compulsories, which account for 50% of the scoring, they
had nailed 23 of 24 routines to finish ahead of the world-champion
Romanians and a scant .127 of a point behind the surprising Russians,
whose tradition of gymnastics excellence shows no signs of having
slipped since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Depth was one factor in the Americans' success. In Moceanu, Dominique
Dawes and Shannon Miller, the U.S. women had three former or current
national champions. Experience was another. Every member of the U.S.
team had participated in at least one world championship, and Dawes,
Miller and Strug were all veterans of the 1992 Olympics.
But perhaps the most important element in the U.S. success was that,
wonder of wonders, the seven members of this team actually like each
other. They pulled for each other. They subordinated personal goals for
those of the team. Nineteen-year-old Amanda Borden, voted team captain,
set the tone, uncomplainingly sitting out two rotations and after every
routine greeting the teammate who performed it with a sisterly hug that
exuded considerably more warmth than those usually doled out by Karolyi
and the other most prominent American coach, Steve Nunno. (Karolyi and
Nunno were required to shout instructions and preen for the television
cameras from outside the barriers because Karolyi's wife, Martha, and
Mary Lee Tracy were the official coaches.) All this was in stark
contrast to '92, when the U.S. women, taking their cue from the
bickering coaching staff, were about as united as a bagful of cats. "The
coaches got along so well this time that we couldn't believe it," says
Miller.
"Everyone had a role on this team," says Tracy, whose interpersonal
skills kept the egos in check. "I tried to make sure everyone's opinion
was heard."
Starting orders for rotations—which go a long way toward
determining who qualifies for the individual all-around—were
determined not on reputation but on the gymnasts' performances at the
nationals and the Olympic trials. Strug won the floor and the vault at
the trials. As a result, though she had been overshadowed her entire
career, first by Kim Zmeskal and then by Moceanu, while toiling in the
Karolyis' gym, Strug was the last American up in those two events.
In Miller (right) and Moceanu, the powerful U.S. team featured the past two national champions.
photograph by
The gymnasts also did some serious bonding while staying in a suburban
location away from the Olympic Village. Those whereabouts were as
closely guarded a secret as who would light the Olympic flame. It turned
out their home away from home was, of all things, a fraternity house at
Emory University. Connally House, a stately brick building with six
two-story columns standing sentinel on the portico, provided the team
with all the comforts of home—individual bedrooms, living room
furniture, televisions with VCRs—plus 24-hour security, which made
the frat house look like the target of a bomb threat. The area around
the building was cordoned off with police tape, and a thick chain was
draped across the driveway, just in case any of the boys from Boit
House, the fraternity across the street, tried to come by for a
handstand or two.
Rested, confident, healthy and poised, the U.S. women needed all of one
rotation in the optionals to obliterate the Russians' lead and pull away
from the Romanians. "They looked like a very strong army, and we looked
like a commando unit trying to survive," says Romanian coach Octavio
Belu, whose team had lost three members to injuries before the
competition.
Jaycie Phelps got the U.S. off to a spectacular start on the uneven bars
with a nearly flawless routine, which earned a 9.787, and suddenly the
Georgia Dome began to sound like the football stadium it is. From the
uppermost tiers, whence the gymnasts looked like tumbling kernels of
rice, chants of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" reverberated with annoying
persistence. As one American woman after another stuck her dismount, the
thunderous roars of 32,000 voices threatened to blow the waiflike
Romanians off the beam. Strug equaled Phelps's mark on the uneven bars,
Moceanu bettered it with a 9.812, Amy Chow weighed in with a 9.837,
Miller matched Phelps's and Strug's score, and Dawes, the top U.S.
overall scorer for the night, topped out the rotation with a spectacular
9.850.
In one round the U.S. had picked up nearly half a point on the Russians
and taken a lead it continued to extend through the floor exercise and
the beam. With one apparatus left—the vault—the U.S. led
second-place Russia by .897, a commanding enough margin that several of
the Russian gymnasts, apparently conceding defeat before the start of
the floor exercise, broke down in tears.
Leads, however, as both Miller and Dawes discovered later in the week
during the individual all-around competition, can evaporate in a
heartbeat, and after Moceanu registered only a 9.20 on the best of her
two vaults, the gold was once again up for grabs. By Strug's own
estimation, she hadn't missed her vault—called a 1 1/2 twisting
Yurchenko—in practice or competition in at least three months. "She
is the one who can do it anytime, anywhere," says Bela. "But seeing
[Moceanu's] two falls, and knowing how important it was, she kind of
dove at the vault and hit it at too flat a trajectory, which killed her
momentum. You need more of an arc."
The most surprised person in the Georgia Dome when Strug found herself
sitting down at the end of her vault was Strug. "My first thought was,
How could you do that?" she says. "Maybe I lost my concentration
worrying about things I shouldn't have been worrying about. I heard a
crack in my ankle, but you hear a lot of cracks in gymnastics. Then I
tried to stand up, and I realized something was really wrong. I couldn't
feel my leg. I kept thinking with each step it would go away, but it
didn't. Bela was saying, 'You can do it. Shake it out.' I kept saying,
'There's something wrong with me.' But there wasn't time to do anything
about it. You only have 30 seconds between vaults. So I said a little
prayer: Please, Lord, help me out here."
The funny thing was, Strug had never been touted as one of Bela's
fearless little girls with the heart of a lion. She was the quiet,
dependable understudy. "Her basic personality was not that aggressive,"
Bela says. "I always had to handle her as a baby. That's what we called
her, the Baby, because she was always the youngest. Even when I was
angry at the group and threw everyone into the same pot of criticism,
she had to be protected with 'except for Kerri.' And she has not a high
tolerance for pain. She was never the roughest or toughest girl."
After Strug blocked out the pain and carried the day, Karolyi transported her to the medal stand.
photograph by
So the gold medal now rested on the shoulders—no, on the sprained
left ankle—of the Baby. Strug is, in fact, the baby of her family,
six years younger than her brother, Kevin, and nine years younger than
her sister, Lisa, and she admits to being spoiled by her parents, Burt,
a heart surgeon in Tucson, and Melanie, a homemaker. But if she is a
baby, she's an extraordinarily willful one. "I could see she was hurt,"
says Melanie, "and as a parent, I'd have said, 'Don't do the vault.' But
knowing Kerri, you couldn't have stopped her unless you'd dragged her
off."
Kerri had been drawn to gymnastics since she was a toddler. Burt
remembers watching her tumble around the living room and asking her to
"please walk on your feet. You're always traveling upside down."
Lisa is a former gymnast who in 1983 trained in the Karolyis' gym with a
certain unknown named Mary Lou Retton. You can guess the rest. Kerri
wanted to do everything her older sister did. She was coached from age
six by Jim Gault, the coach at the University of Arizona, and Kerri
became a fixture around Gault's college teams. Try this, the older girls
would say, and Kerri would suddenly have learned a new skill. "I saw how
in college everything was team oriented," she says, "and everyone had a
lot of fun. That was my goal before I ever dreamed of competing in the
Olympics."
"She's quiet, driven, an overachiever," says her father. "She's totally
self-motivated and wants to be perfect all the time."
When Strug turned 12, she told her parents she wanted to move to Houston
to train with Karolyi. "I knew if I was going to make the '92 team," she
says, "I had to make a change."
So Strug moved to Houston. She had an aunt and uncle, Ann and Don
Mangold, there, but for convenience she lived with a family near the gym
and visited the Mangolds on weekends. Her parents visited her every
couple of weeks, and while at times she was lonely, it was a lot like
just being away at school. In 1991 Strug became the youngest member of
the national team, and at 14 she was the baby of the
bronze-medal-winning Olympic team at Barcelona. She kept her dream of
competing in college alive by turning down all overtures from agents and
all appearance fees for exhibitions, and, after graduating from high
school in Tucson last summer with a 4.0 average, Strug deferred
enrollment at UCLA for a year to concentrate on qualifying for Atlanta.
"I've always said that only a Mary Lou-type opportunity could keep me
from competing in college," says Strug. "Now those words have kind of
jumped up to bite me. A week ago I knew what I was going to do for the
next couple of years. Now agents are calling and offers are coming in we
never dreamed of. Everyone's telling me I'm the Mary Lou of these
Olympics. It's overwhelming."
When Strug watches the tape of that final, riveting vault, what she
cannot believe is that, somehow, she isn't limping during her approach.
Karolyi says that even the slightest list in her stride would have
destroyed her rhythm and made a successful vault impossible, but the
adrenaline, and possibly the prayer, allowed her to block out the pain
and sprint down the runway full throttle. "I was thinking about the
vault and nothing else," Strug says. "I felt pretty good in the air, but
I'd felt good the time before, too. Then when I landed, I heard another
crack. A lot of people are criticizing Bela for encouraging me to do it,
but I'm 18. I'm an adult. I make my own choices. It was definitely my
decision and kind of a matter of pride. I didn't want to be remembered
for falling on my butt in my best event."
As it turned out, the last two Russian competitors, Dina Kochetkova and
Rozalia Galiyeva, turned in mediocre floor routines, so the Americans
would have won by .309 without the vault that has changed Strug's life.
But she couldn't have known that at the time, and it makes her no less a
hero. That final vault, for which she scored 9.712, aggravated her
injury to such an extent that it torpedoed her longtime goal of
competing in the Olympic individual all-around—she had missed out
in 1992 by .0012. "She had the best day of her life and the worst day of
her life in five seconds," Burt says.
Disappointment, pride and pain all were etched on Strug's face when
Karolyi carried her to the podium to receive her gold medal. But two
days later, while watching her teammates warm up for the all-around
competition (her place in the lineup had been taken by Moceanu), Strug,
still on crutches, showed only the disappointment. "She was a basket
case," says Melanie. "She cried all through the beginning of the
competition. Even after all that's happened—meeting the President,
being a so-called hero, having all these new opportunities—she said
to me, 'I have not achieved both my goals: a team gold and competing in
the individual all-around.' I told her, 'Kerri, sometimes you don't
reach all your goals in life.'"
It was a lesson reiterated in various ways throughout the week. Dawes
and Miller, who were one-two through the first two rotations of last
Thursday's all-around competition, both stepped out-of-bounds on the
floor exercise, which knocked them out of medal contention and brought
them to tears. The crown went to world champion Lilia Podkopayeva of
Ukraine, a 17-year-old powerhouse who became the first woman to follow
her world title with an Olympic crown since the Soviet Union's Lyudmila
Turischeva did so in 1972.
All-around excellence: Li became China's first man to win gold.
photograph by
On the men's side, Russia won the team gold, but individual honors went
to Li Xiaoshuang, who became the first Chinese man to win the
all-around, by edging Russia's Alexei Nemov by a scant .049. Vitaly
Scherbo of Belarus, a six-time gold medalist in 1992, was third.
The American men finished a respectable fifth in the team competition,
one place higher than in Barcelona, and had hopes of a surprise bronze
medal until faltering on their nemesis, the pommel horse. In the
all-around John Roethlisberger (7th) and Blaine Wilson (10th) gave the
U.S. its two highest finishes since the Soviet-boycotted Games of '84.
But it was in Monday's apparatus finals that the American men finally
broke through to the medal stand. Twenty-four-year-old Jair Lynch, the
last man up on the parallel bars, scored a 9.825 to earn a silver medal,
giving the men a much-needed psychological boost as they look ahead to
Sydney, four years hence.
The women, emotionally drained from the excitement of winning the team
gold, showed uncharacteristic signs of nerves in the apparatus finals.
Only Chow came through on Sunday, taking the silver on the uneven bars.
On Monday, Miller, who had been struggling since the individual
all-around, redeemed herself by winning on the beam, her seventh Olympic
medal and her first individual gold.
And Strug? As desperately as she wanted to compete in the apparatus
finals, she withdrew from both the vault and the floor exercise (in
which Dawes replaced her and earned a bronze). U.S. team physician
Daniel Carr said that Strug's ankle would take a minimum of three weeks
to heal, and to compete would do further damage. But Strug continued to
take therapy, continued to work on her routines in whatever ways she
could and continued to try to wish the swelling away until a few minutes
before Monday's competition. That's when Karolyi told her that the
doctor had said no go. "She did not take it well," he said. "She
believed she could do it, but the miracle cannot happen."
Then again, perhaps it already did.
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