The Orphan

It is 48 years since a U.S. gymnastic team won an Olympic championship. Even that victory at the world's fair in St. Louis in 1904 may have been hollow: some experts still say that the Americans won because there was no real European competition, and furthermore predict that the U.S. will never turn out a topflight team. Why can't the U.S. produce champion gymnasts? One man who thinks he knows is German-born Coach Bernard Unser of the famed Bronx branch of the American Turners (until 1948, the Turnverein'). Says Unser: "In this country gymnastics is not considered a sport as it is in Europe. The average person here says, 'What do I care about people on monkey bars!' "

No matter what the public says, 92 steel-armed men and 38 agile women risked making monkeys of themselves last week at Pennsylvania State College. They were thrashing about for the National Amateur Athletic Union gymnastic titles. For some, the stakes were bigger: eight berths each on the men's & women's 1952 Olympic teams. The men's Olympic events demand all-round agility on 1) a single horizontal bar, 2) two parallel bars, 3) a side horse, 4) a long horse, 5) a pair of suspended rings. The sixth event: free calisthenics, i.e., without hand apparatus.

Olympic gymnasts must excel in all six events; the points they make in each specialty are totaled, first for individuals, then for their team. The high team total wins the Olympic title. Thus, the few specialists developed by the U.S. have actually dragged down the team's total in past Olympics and proved more hindrance than help to their more versatile fellows.

At the Penn State meet, a Philadelphia schoolteacher, 26-year-old Bob Stout, upset the Bronx Turners' favored Edward Scrobe, to take the all-round title and win the No. 1 Olympic berth on the men's team. A fellow member of Stout's Philadelphia club, wiry Housewife Clara Schroth Lomady, 31, won the all-round honors for women for the fourth year, clinched her No. 1 Olympic spot for the second time.

In the 1948 Olympics, U.S. women beat some relatively easy competition to place third, outshining the U.S. men, who wound up seven notches below the Finnish champions. U.S. Olympic Coach Gene Wettstone, who calls U.S. gymnastics an "orphan sport," remains glum. Eying American prospects for Helsinki this summer, he thinks "foreign countries will probably top us again."

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