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                                                                                OLYMPICS, Page 56

1992 SUMMER GAMES

GYMNASTICS: Ode to Joylessness


The women seemed tense and strained. This time it was the men
who were fun to watch.

By JILL SMOLOWE -- With reporting by Susanna M. Schrobsdorff/
Barcelona


    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 Mi sutin,
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.