Finishing First, At Last

By B. J. Phillips

Led by Mary Lou, U.S. gymnasts fly high

The night before the finals in women's gymnastics last week, Mary Lou Retton, 16, lay in bed at the Olympic Village, conjuring. It was an established ritual for her, no different from the imaginings of a hundred other nights. "I see myself hitting all my routines, doing everything perfectly," says Retton. "I imagine all the moves and go through them with the image in my mind." The following day, the spunky Retton led the U.S. team through a stylish and rousingly high-flying performance. The Americans could not quite match the lavishly talented and seasoned Rumanian team, but their second-place finish won them a silver medal. It was the first team medal ever won by the U.S. in women's international gymnastics competition. The moment fully lived up to Retton's expectations: "It was just like I dreamed it, the excitement, the tension, the crowd, the feeling you have standing on the podium with an Olympic medal."

But as they left the arena, Retton had sneaked a close look at the Rumanians' medals, and told U.S. Women's Coach Don Peters, "Theirs are shinier than ours." Two nights later, everything that glittered was around Retton's neck. She won the gold medal in the all-around championship, the most coveted prize in gymnastics, since it marks the winner as the finest gymnast in the world. It is the crown Nadia Comaneci once wore, and Lyudmila Tourischeva, and which Olga Korbut, for all her charm, was too limited an athlete to achieve. Retton sealed her claim to it in the most dramatic duel in the history of the sport, winning by performing a perfect 10 in her final event, the vault--not once but twice. A lesser score would have meant defeat, or at best a tie. But while the nation held its breath, she flew off the vault and into gymnastics history.

Like Retton, Peter Vidmar and Tim Daggett had a dream. As gymnastics teammates at UCLA, they always concluded their workouts with a fantasy. "We'd pretend it was the Olympics," Vidmar recalls. "We'd turn off the radio, and the gym would be all silent. We'd go to the high bar, and then we'd say, 'O.K., we have to hit both of our routines perfect in order to win the Olympic gold medal.' We always laughed, because it seemed so unrealistic. And all of a sudden, we found ourselves in that exact situation. It was incredible." But not as incredible as how they lived out the dream. Daggett scored a 10 and Vidmar a 9.95 on the high bar to clinch a victory over the world champion Chinese team in the men's finals. It was a first for the men's team as well: their first Olympic medal, and the sweetest one of all--the gold.

The triumphs and the medals once were only dreams. But a boom in gymnastics, especially in the U.S., has brought a gifted new generation of athletes into the sport while extending the careers of experienced competitors. One result, as the Los Angeles Olympics have convincingly proved, is that the U.S. has become a new force in world gymnastics. Indeed, modern gymnastics--more athletic than ethereal, as daring as they are precise--have become a sport ideally suited to the American character. Long dominated by Europeans, especially the Soviets, gymnastics stressed Old World considerations of grace and style as much as athletic power. Whatever gymnasts did--and the feats of strength and agility were considerable--how it was done was as important as what was done: the toes always had to be pointed.

Today the toes are still pointed, but innovations in ancient gymnastics equipment have virtually freed the athletes from gravity, thus making physical pyrotechnics the premiere element of the sport. The mats on which gymnasts tumble are no longer mere padding to protect against injury, but launching pads mounted on springs. The extra oomph affords additional milliseconds of hang time during which gymnasts can twist and twirl through the same maneuvers as a high diver's. For male gymnasts, wooden dowels inserted into their leather handgrips allow a lock-grip on the high bar and make possible daring-young-man flyaway tricks like the Gaylord II (see box page 46).

It took the Olympics to showcase the new gymnastics and their freshly minted champions in a week of competition as razor close as it was electric. How far the sport has come in its public appeal could be seen by the crowds that thronged into the 12,700-capacity Pauley Pavilion on the UCLA campus for every major event. One of the dozens of NEED TICKETS signs outside the men's team finals was held aloft by a young UCLA student. Three members of the men's team are fellow UCLA Bruins and, she noted, things were different at their college meets: "I used to get in free, and there would be about 30 people in the stands at Pauley," she said. "Now tickets cost $95, and a million won't get you in."

True, but it was worth the price. The members of the U.S. men's team had been practicing together for five weeks, and during that time old rivalries that began in junior competitions and collegiate careers were put aside. In team gymnastics, teamwork rather than solitary brilliance is what makes the victory. As routines become more complex and difficult, the maximum score of 10 does not mean perfection so much as it means a better and harder performance than the previous competitor's. For that reason, the order in which gymnasts compete is crucial: coaches send out their lineups of six team members in inverse ratio to their accomplishment. The weakest competitor in a given event goes first, and his score becomes the base with which the rest are compared. If the first scores well and the second a bit better, the judges' scores ratchet up until, finally, the top performer goes out last in hopes of building on a base now escalated to 9.90 or 9.95.

The strategy sounds simple, but the catch is that it is predicated on sacrifice. Thus Bart Conner, at 26 the smooth old master technician of the squad, an Olympian since 1976 and one of two American men since 1932 to win an individual gold medal in a world championship (the other: Kurt Thomas), was sent to the floor second and third to "make base" for the more flamboyant routines of Vidmar and Mitch Gaylord. Similarly, James Hartung, 24, and Scott Johnson, 23, dutifully rolled out in the early rounds, though they knew that in doing so, they gave up their hopes for individual medals. Says Gaylord: "In every other meet I've competed in, the egos come out when the coach announces the lineup. But this team is unique. There was never a complaint, just one goal: to pump up the scores for the team, not for individuals."

Even Gaylord, performer of the world's most difficult high-bar routine and an acknowledged favorite for a 10 if he performs sixth in the rotation, went third during the finals to boost the score for his teammates. The successful completion of his patented Gaylord II earned a 9.95 and, more important, made Daggett's 10 possible. U.S. Men's Coach Abie Grossfeld sums it up: "We won because our fourth, fifth and sixth guys were better than theirs."

Still, it was a near thing. As the competition began the last two of its six events, just hundredths of a point separated the Americans and the Chinese, with the Chinese leading as they headed toward the high bar, their strongest apparatus, and the floor exercise. The teams set up side by side at one end of the arena, the Americans on the parallel bars, the Chinese on the high. Their scores flashed seconds apart in a tit-for-tat exchange of steadily mounting tension. Johnson opened with a 9.80 to Li Yuejiu's 9.90. Hartung countered with a 9.90, while the Chinese leveled off, unable to push their scores higher. Finally, Conner topped out with a 10; the U.S. team pulled ahead.

In the last event, as the U.S. moved to the high bar, Johnson failed for the first time in the competition, touching down with his hands as he landed after an otherwise respectable routine. His 9.50 was a shaky foundation, but the lowest score in each round is discarded and need not prove fatal if the rest of the team recoups. Hartung promptly notched a 9.80, and the base was firm once more. Gaylord followed with a 9.95, Daggett with a 10, and it was over.

The following night, it was the women's turn. But instead of protecting a lead, the U.S. team was chasing the Rumanians. With Comaneci in residence at the team quarters in the Olympic Village (and introduced each night to an ovation from the crowd), Rumania's women could never forget their legacy or fail to uphold it. Yet it was a burden they bore lightly. When one of the team's top performers, Lavinia Agache, 18, was asked if she wanted to be as good as Nadia, she replied, "Yes. I want to be better."

There are no Nadias among them--her particular perfection remains unchallenged--but it is fitting that the Rumanians won the gold medal on the balance beam, the event that Comaneci had once commanded with uncommon aplomb. The beam, a 4-in.-wide strip that demands the greatest precision and exacts the severest penalties for the minutest errors, is the great winnower of women gymnasts. It is a tightrope without a net, and every bit as dangerous as turning handsprings on a cliff. Beam injuries have been crippling, and few women ever lose their fear of it. When it is done well, the beam reveals a choreographed grace made lovelier by the rigors of its execution. But make a mistake, lose balance for a nanosecond, and the result is an ugly flailing of arms to remain perched on the thing or a bone-crunching fall.

To this unforgiving apparatus was added the obligatory flap over judging, without which no gymnastics meet would be complete. Like figure skating, gymnastics is a subjective sport: performance is in the eyes of the judges beholding it. National loyalties and geopolitical considerations being what they are, the beholder can cast a blind or a jaundiced eye, or an indulgent one, depending upon where the gymnast is from. During the compulsory exercises on the balance beam, U.S. Coach Peters lodged four protests over marks given to the Americans by Rumanian Judge Julia Roterescu. But having gone 4 for 6 in the complaint department, Peters went 0 for 4 in the appeals process. Nonetheless, he had his point. Roterescu consistently gave the Americans scores as much as .4 and .5 of a point below those given by the other three judges, yet she gave one Rumanian a 9.90 despite a near fall, supposedly an automatic .2-point deduction according to the rules.

During the second night's competition, the rest of the judges could only agree, if not in such inflated terms, with Roterescu's opinion of the Rumanian team's performance. At the same time, some of the U.S. stars were not at their best. Julianne McNamara, 18, forced to wait for more than five minutes while Roterescu's previous score provoked another judges' haggle, lost her concentration and fell doing a mount that she has not missed in years. Crashes are contagious, and the rest of the American team struggled to remain aboard during their routines. In all, the U.S. team lost an insurmountable 1.8 points to the Rumanians on the balance beam. The battle for the gold ended there.

Despite brilliant moments, the American team was just not as deep as the Rumanians; the fourth, fifth and sixth competitors could not lay the foundation as their male counterparts had. Michelle Dusserre and Pam Bileck, both 15, performed with the skittishness of youth, doing well in some events and faltering in others. It was left to Kathy Johnson, at 24 the admitted "old lady," to anchor the team. Hers was the steadying base on which the higher scores had to be built.

As for America's top women, they showed that they can now hold their own with anyone in the world. That includes the absent Soviets, who defeated the Rumanians in the 1983 world championships and whose top gymnast, Natalia Yurtchenko, would have been a favored contender for individual honors in these Olympics. Julianne McNamara is the best there is on the uneven bars. Her line is as perfect as a ballerina's, and she flows so lightly from one bar to the next, one movement to another, that the bars sing for her. She got a 10 to prove it. On the floor exercise, she won another perfect mark with choreography in which she seemed to levitate.

Retton, by contrast, is a 4-ft. 9-in. study in power, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound and do a full-twisting layout double Tsukahara (a maneuver only a few men in the world can perform) while she is at it. On the vault, she earned a 10 with that trick, which calls for pouncing onto the vault, then pushing into the stratosphere with her arms and twisting 360DEG while doing a double somersault with her body perfectly straight.

Thanks to such razzle-dazzle, Retton led the field at the beginning of the all-around competition with a cumulative score of 39.525 points. Just behind her, with 39.375, was Rumania's leading gymnast, Ecaterina Szabo, 17, a smoothly solid performer who rarely makes mistakes. Tied for third place were another Rumanian, Laura Cutina, 16, and McNamara, with 39.200.

Beginning on the beam, Szabo lived up to her reputation, and confirmed the Rumanian dominance of the event, by stepping up cold and calmly nailing a 10. She not only performed risky maneuvers flawlessly but managed to make her narrow ground seem like a stage for the Bolshoi Ballet. At one point she rolled off four consecutive backward handsprings, one more than the beam seems capable of containing and two more than any other gymnast tried. Retton's performance on the uneven bars, on the other hand, was, for her, mediocre. The judges gave her a 9.85, and the score was tied.

In the second series, Retton gave a creditable performance on the beam, but she had one serious loss of balance after landing a back somersault. The judges marked it, by the book, for a 9.80. Szabo moved to the floor exercise. There again, she was as athletic as she was balletic, alternating stunning twists and turns with lyrical dance movements. Her 9.95 put her in the lead by .15 with only two events remaining.

Retton had her turn on the mat next. Nowhere is the difference in the two performers' styles more apparent. If Szabo is European velvet, Retton is muscular American brashness. No one can generate her speed or leap to her heights; she can do numbers in floor exercises known only to men. On her first tumbling run, she pounded out enough time in the air to pull off a layout double back somersault, and exploded into a dazzling smile. It did not dim for the rest of her routine. When she landed her final twisting somersault, she had notched a 10. Szabo did not give any ground, however. She went out with solid 9.90s on the vault and, finally, the uneven bars.

So it came down to Retton on the vault in the final event. As she waited her turn, her personal coach, Bela Karolyi, leaned across the photographers' barricade from his seat in the stands and showed her a piece of paper on which the arithmetic had been done: score a 9.95 to tie Szabo for the gold, score a 10 to stand alone as all-around champion. Anything less would mean the silver. He bent down to hold and shake her shoulders; she nodded intensely.

At last the green light signaling her turn came on. In the tense silence that fell, one could hear her feet drumming the runway, then she leaped onto the springboard and pushed her handspring high toward the banner-draped rafters. She twisted, turned and landed without having to move so much as a toe to keep her balance. Neither Retton nor Karolyi nor the crowd needed a judge to tell them it was perfect. Without waiting for the 10 to flash, Retton ran to the barricades for a quick embrace with Karolyi, then, strutting the pigeon-toed linebacker's walk that more than anything else reveals her power, she hopped back on the runway to wave to the crowd and shake her fists overhead in triumph. For one long moment she looked to the ceiling, where all those dreams had been every night. And then, as if embarked on a public "pinch me to see if I'm real," she went out and did it again, another 10 on another double-layout Tsukahara. The first U.S. Olympic all-around champion had crowned herself.

Retton, in fact, is the exemplar of what Bela Karolyi calls "the new kind of gymnast." Says he: "She's strong and powerful and athletic; not a little flower, a little flyer." Karolyi, who discovered and trained Comaneci and presided over the early development of Retton's principal rivals from Rumania, Szabo and Agache, knows a trend when he sees one. In his 4-ft. 9-in., 92-lb. dynamo, he knows he has found a star.

Retton seemed fated for gymnastics since she was a toddler in Fairmont, W. Va. "I was one of those hyper kids, always jumping up and down on the couch and breaking things," she says. In self-defense her parents sent her off to an acrobatics class. At first, she went to the gym just once a week, but, she says, "I just got better and better, and so the people who ran the acrobatics class decided to start a gymnastics club so I could train to see if I could keep improving." By 14, she knew she could strike for the first rank if she could find the right coach.

Conveniently enough, Karolyi and his wife Marta had just defected from the Rumanian team during an American tour. They walked into the New York office of the Department of Immigration and Naturalization with no assets other than the suitcases in their hands and a world of gymnastics knowledge in their heads. They opened shop in Houston. A year later, having met Karolyi at a meet, Mary Lou and her parents packed her bags and drove 24 hours to Texas. "It was at Christmas time," Mary Lou recalls. "Leaving home was so hard."

She lived with a local family whose daughter is also a top-flight gymnast. The relationship she formed with her coach was and is close, as any television viewer could see last week when she veered off to confer with him, and get encouraging hugs, before every step on the arena floor. They have even come to gesture alike, with Mary Lou pounding a fist into a palm when a routine goes well and summoning a Balkan shrug when it does not. Says Karolyi: "It's an excellent kid, Mary Lou. She's so powerful physically, and she's mentally powerful too. I was teaching gymnastics 25 years, and had many world and Olympic champions. But I never had somebody more positive and dedicated than this little girl."

Mary Lou had to prove it during the weeks leading up to the opening ceremonies. In June, torn cartilage caused her knee to lock. She flew to Richmond, Va., for eleventh-hour arthroscopic surgery to remove three fragments that had drifted under her patella. Doctors operated at 8 a.m., making three small incisions to remove the cartilage, clear the blockage and restore flexibility to the joint. At 7:30 p.m., she boarded a plane to Houston; the next morning, she was in the gym riding an exercise bike. Exactly two weeks after the surgery, she was flying through the air and landing without a wince. Six weeks later, she had become the first American all-around gymnastics champion in any international competition, let alone the Olympics.

On the men's side, Peter Vidmar missed the same distinction by an achingly narrow margin, falling short of the gold in the all-around by a mere .025 point. "Twenty-five one-thousandths of a point," says Vidmar. "Maybe I wish the difference would have been two-tenths or three-tenths. Now I could say, 'If I didn't take a step here, if I didn't take a step there.' " In fact, it was precisely two steps that cost him the gold. In the floor exercise, he was twice forced to take a small step at the end of his tumbling runs. His score of 9.80 was his lowest of the night and a full tenth of a point less than his previous low in the event. In the three-decimal-point terms of Olympic scoring, that tenth of a point could have converted his .025-point deficit into a munificent lead.

The man who beat Vidmar was Japan's Koji Gushiken, who won the gold with a performance as gritty as it was fine. At 27, he had come to Los Angeles to cap his career, but his chances seemed fatally damaged when he fell from the pommel horse during the second day of competition and scored 9.45. But after that debacle he said, "I did not come here to fail." And so he did not. Gushiken is a gymnast of another generation, noted less for the daring supertrick than for the traditional virtues of technical mastery and elegant style. He relentlessly kept the pressure on Vidmar, racking up superior scores like a machine. In a total of 18 routines, he scored 9.90 or better on 13 of them. Vidmar, by being only slightly less consistent, ended up with the silver medal, still an impressive accomplishment.

As the week ended, the American men as well as the women could look forward to the prospect of further medals in contests on individual apparatuses. But for a nation that previously had won but two Olympic gymnastics medals in 52 years, the market had already been brisk indeed. It was the oldtimer Bart Conner who best summed up the dramatic transformation that had taken place. "I've been a part of gymnastics in America when we weren't any good at all," said Conner. "To be a part of it now when we come to this moment, when we finally pull it off . . . I'm so happy I stayed around to be a part of this. From this moment on, we will always be Olympic champions." --By BJ. Phillips