Gymnastics Ode to Joylessness

By Jill Smolowe

Somewhere in the Olympic Village as the partying picks up pace, it is not hard to imagine a 14-year-old girl crying. Her name is Roza Galieva. She is the gymnast from the gold-winning Unified Team who successfully fought her way to the coveted all-around competition, only to be robbed of her chance. Her coaches, in their unified wisdom, decided that one of Galieva's teammates, Tatiana Gutsu, was more likely to bank gold even though she had flubbed during the earlier team competition. So they exaggerated a knee injury to bench Galieva, made a quick substitution and, lo, Gutsu was in. Sure enough, she won the gold. Now Gutsu's triumph, impressive as it was, will always carry a caveat -- "Remember? She didn't even qualify for the all-around." And Galieva will have to digest the bitter lesson that fairness and feelings count for nothing in gymnastics; all that matters is winning.

And that, in a nutshell, may explain the curious lack of joy last Thursday evening in the Palau Sant Jordi. The women's all-around should have been an energizing high for rapt spectators. The field of competitors was so deep with talent that on any given day, the gold medal could have hung deservedly on any one of eight necks from four countries. There was enough grace to satisfy balletomanes and enough difficulty to suggest that the laws of gravity ought to be rewritten. Yet there was little of the heartwarming drama that in Olympics past enabled audiences to lose their hearts to a charismatic Olga, a mysterious Nadia or an exuberant Mary Lou. The gymnasts often seemed more like automatons than human beings. Even on the medal stand, Gutsu and her fellow medalists -- Shannon Miller of the U.S. and Romania's Lavinia Milosovici -- conveyed little joy. They seemed to have not so much won as survived.

The men's competition had a different feel entirely. Early in the week, the Unified Team waged a spectacular last hurrah. Its gymnasts occupied four of the top five spots, and its sixth gymnast beat the best performer from the U.S. team. In a sport where differences are measured in thousandths of a point, the Unified Team twisted and spun to gold with more than five full points to spare over China and Japan. Coming a night after the women's tense team competition, the exuberance of the men's unified effort was a welcome relief. Teammates cheered and hugged and seemed to revel in the triumph of Vitali Scherbo, 20, who took top marks in three of the six events.

The night of the men's all-around, members of the Unified Team were again the ones to watch, but now they were rivals, even competing under different flags. Save for the challenge of Germany's Andreas Wecker, there was little doubt that the ex-Soviets would sweep the medals. The only question was, In what order? The suspense continued right to the end of the last event, when Scherbo of Belarus took the top mark on the rings, a 9.9, which secured him the gold. Ukraine's Grigory Misutin, 21, took silver, while the bronze went to Valeri Belenky, 22, of Azerbaijan.

As for the Americans, a sixth-place team finish was followed by no higher than a 19th-place finish in the all-around. None of this came as much of a surprise, despite optimistic precompetition talk of a bronze medal. Most of the top U.S. male gymnasts are college students who abide by NCAA guidelines that restrict their training to 20 hours a week, roughly half the practice time of their main challengers. The American women, by contrast, are mostly still in high school and train in private gyms where no restrictions apply. Their discipline and dedication earned them a team bronze in a well-fought battle with the Unified Team and the Romanians -- the first such medal for the U.S. in a nonboycotted Olympics since 1948.

While excellence was evident on the U.S. women's team, a sense of unity was not. Certainly it didn't help that the six competitors and one alternate were thrown together only one month earlier. It helped even less that head coach Bela Karolyi and the other U.S. coaches bickered all the way to Barcelona. "The coaches hate each other," said someone close to the team. "Sometimes the girls feel as if they can't talk to each other because their coach will get upset." Word leaked out of the Olympic Village that the gymnasts were under strict regulations: no phone calls or leaving their rooms without permission, no unauthorized food. Small wonder that each gymnast performed her routine, looked anxiously to her personal coach for feedback, then turned inward to focus on the next event. In Olympics of old, the stony- faced Americans might have been mistaken for Soviets.

The Unified Team, meanwhile, displayed an uncharacteristic degree of emotionalism during their journey to a 10th gold in as many Olympics. While their camaraderie contrasted starkly with the Americans' standoffishness, the comparison is a bit unfair, since the team's members have lived and trained together for years. Perhaps because the six gymnasts from four republics will never again compete as one, they found it harder to keep their emotions in check. When Gutsu toppled from the balance beam, seemingly dashing her all- around hopes, the team surrounded her. The sight of Svetlana Boginskaya, 19, the team's long-reigning princess, wrapping her arms protectively around the shattered 15-year-old was enough to move even the unsentimental.

But two days later when Galieva miraculously came down with a "knee injury" -- thus clearing the way for Gutsu to compete -- it should have revived cold war cynicism. Instead, few rival coaches batted an eye. Indeed, just two weeks before the Olympics, a Pennsylvania gymnast named Kim Kelly, who had fulfilled the competitive requirements to make the U.S. team fair and square, was dropped from the squad by the American coaches to make room for another athlete they felt had greater potential. Kelly considered filing suit, then opted instead to show up in Barcelona, her presence a quiet rebuke of a selection process that even Karolyi denounces as "ugly."

That nothing worked out in the all-around quite as predicted was, well, predictable. Gymnastics, after all, is a sport where athletes are in a race against not only one another but their own maturing bodies. Going in, the favorites included Boginskaya, Kim Zmeskal of the U.S. and Romania's Cristina Bontas. Each was kept off the medal podium by a younger teammate. Under the "new life" rules enacted in 1989, which allow the gymnasts to enter the all-around with a clean slate, Gutsu was able to set aside her earlier wobbles during the team contest. Competing under the Ukrainian flag, she performed some of the evening's most difficult routines.

The U.S.'s Shannon Miller hardly needed a fresh start after the team rounds. The graceful 15-year-old had performed solidly throughout that competition, and she continued without any major breaks in the individual all-around. If there had been a gold medal for consistency, Miller would have been without rival. As it was, she missed the gold by only 0.012 -- whatever that means. Miller and Milosovici were the only gymnasts who qualified for all four apparatus finals, and there Miller shone again, taking a silver on the beam and a bronze on both the bars and floor.

For Zmeskal, 16, it was an Olympics filled with tragic falls, heroic recoveries and disappointing finishes. A Karolyi protege who had been expected to take a run at the gold, the Texan got off to a shaky start with a spill from the beam during her first pass on her first piece of apparatus on her first day of competition. Showing her grit, she fought back and secured a legitimate place in the all-around. But come that night, she was again jittery on her first event, stepping out of bounds on her floor routine, losing an automatic 0.1 point. She finished 10th. In the apparatus finals, she crash- / landed on a vault, then fought back with a rousing floor routine -- only to be scorned again by the judges.

Surely Zmeskal's confidence was not boosted by Karolyi's announcement -- oddly timed after the team finals but before the all-around -- that he was retiring from elite gymnastic competition. Given Karolyi's fierce politicking, it was not unreasonable to wonder if he thought there might be some advantage in this announcement for Zmeskal and another of his gymnasts, Betty Okino. Perhaps he thought the judges would smile more benignly upon them, or that it might inspire one of them to cap his coaching career with a seventh gold medal. If so, it didn't work. And those who know him well, including Mary Lou Retton and Zmeskal, say they don't believe he's really quitting. "You must understand," says Yuri Titov, president of the International Gymnastics Federation, "it is just a form of theater."

Miller's coach, Steve Nunno, also did a bit of spotlight hogging. In vintage Karolyi style, he screamed and flailed his arms and offered photo-op bear hugs. When Miller got a 9.975 on her vault, enough to secure only the silver, Nunno complained that she had been robbed of the gold. "She was the winner, no doubt in my mind," he said. "I thought it was a 10." Never mind that the women's judges awarded no 10s that day, and awarded only two during the entire competition. Never mind that others far younger who also felt robbed handled it with considerably more grace.

In the end, it seemed that the most colorful and spirited performances of the women's competition were offered by the coaches. Meanwhile, their petite proteges -- few of them older than 16 or taller than 5 ft. -- went about their business in bloodless fashion. Perhaps the almost mechanical performances were an apt reflection of the grueling training and inhumane culling process they go through. "We are not in the gym to be having fun," Karolyi likes to say. "The fun comes in the end, with the winning and the medals." By then, it would seem, the gymnasts lucky enough to triumph are too worn out to enjoy it.

With reporting by Susanna M. Schrobsdorff/Barcelona