It was in a frat house, two miles from the Georgia Dome, that the United States women's gymnastics team prepared to do battle. Their target at the 1996 Atlanta Games was the Russians. Driven on by their controversial Romanian coach, Bela Karolyi, they had been trained to focus on winning the team event that Soviet gymnasts had dominated for four decades.
In that house at Emory University, cordoned off by police tape and with a chain across the driveway, Karolyi fostered the atmosphere of intensity with which he demanded success. The stars of the seven-strong team – half athletes, half circus tumblers – were Shannon Miller, the most decorated American gymnast ever, and the 14-year-old Dominique Moceanu, who had graced the cover of Vanity Fair in the build-up to the Games.
Dominique Dawes was another of their great hopes, with Amy Chow, Amanda Borden and Jaycie Phelps all members of a team that would become known as The Magnificent Seven. But the moment that would come to define the Atlanta Games would belong to the least prepossessing of them all. Freckled, slight and determined, Kerri Strug was a trier; a reliable, essential but unremarkable cog in a powerful engine. At 18, weighing 6st 3lb and standing just 4ft 9in, she was perhaps the least heralded of an eye-catching lineup. As her coach Karolyi later said of her: "She is so little, she is not a fighter like the others." He had obviously read her wrong.
She grew up in Tucson, Arizona, idolising her older sister Lisa – also a gymnast. Aged eight, she began to compete and by 12, people were telling her she had a future. Working with Karolyi in his Houston gym was the next step. "I wanted to really go somewhere in gymnastics, so I figured I would have to leave home," she said. "And if you're going to leave home, you might as well come to the best."
Karolyi was a wildly successful and utterly ruthless trainer. Before his defection from Romania to the United States in March 1981, he had been known as "Coach Dracula" in the West. But his methods worked: he drove the 14-year-old Nadia Comaneci to achieve perfection on the asymmetric bars in Montreal in 1976, forging such a fervid relationship with the gymnast that her friends claimed she attempted suicide when, on the orders of President Ceaucescu, she was removed from his care.
There was controversy, too. At Karolyi's Romanian gym, shadowy rumours abounded that the country's authorities fed their adolescent gymnasts drugs to postpone puberty without Karolyi's knowledge, stories Comaneci later seemed to confirm. "We were given so many things to take," she said. "We were never told what they were for." Other gymnasts talked of the abuse Karolyi meted out. "We, you know, just got smacked everywhere from Bela – on all our body parts. He has huge hands and it hurts," said Emelia Eberle.
"On certain days we were hit until blood was pouring out of our nose," added another, Rodica Dunca. "I ignore it. I'm not even commenting. These people are really trash," retorted Karolyi in 2008.
But it meant that his reputation went before him: the beast from the East who demanded – and got – perfection from his athletes.
His 1981 defection to the US was not as simple as he thought. In the States for a series of exhibitions, he and his wife walked out of a side door of New York's Essex hotel and marched to the US State Department to apply for asylum – never mind that his daughter Andrea was still at home in Romania.
Though the Americans trumpeted his arrival, and despite the fact he was among the most successful coaches in the history of women's gymnastics, he was forced to work as a dock labourer in Long Beach, a three-hour walk from his cheap hotel, and learned English from watching The Flintstones. "The first words I learn is 'you Commie sonovabeech,' " he said. "I am angry. Here is man who gave the world Nadia, living like an animal." His remarkable drive would mean that within seven years he would be the most dominant force in US women's gymnastics, leading his new charges against his former countrymen in Romania.
With backing from a group of businessmen, he opened a Houston gym soon afterwards. Within 18 months 500 athletes had enrolled – including Mary Lou Retton, the all-round champion at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, and the uneven bars gold medallist Julianne McNamara. By 1988, he was head coach of the women's Olympic team. His results were achieved, if you believe his detractors, by bullying and intimidation. In her autobiography, Off Balance, Moceanu echoed the complaints of the Romanian gymnasts, and accused him and his wife Martha of physical assaults and of starving their charges. "This warped-body image would haunt me for years to come," she wrote of her tiny frame.
It was into this culture that Strug arrived in 1991, a fresh-faced 13-year-old. She trained for six or seven days a week, eight hours a day. Away from her family, the Karolyis monitored all aspects of her life, watching everything she ate and even when she slept. "It was very hard at times," said Strug. "When you got down or had a bad day, you got to a phone and talked to your parents a lot."
Within two years she was in Barcelona at the Olympics where she helped the team win bronze but, afterwards, suffered four years of injuries and setbacks – not helped by Karolyi's temporary retirement. By 1996, though, she was back with him and riding the success of winning gold in the America's Cup competition in March. In June's Olympic trials, she finished second, winning the vault and floor exercise disciplines. Karolyi allowed her one night off to see her family. They went out for pizza – Strug, remembering her coach's regime, picking off the cheese from each illicit slice.
By July she was in Karolyi's secret frat-house base outside Atlanta. There he demanded focus. Except for their boycott in 1984, women gymnasts from the former Soviet Union had won the team gold at every Games since 1948. Karolyi was determined to end the run.
USA found themselves in second place after Sunday's compulsory sessions, 0.127 behind Russia and 0.531 ahead of Romania. On Monday they surged ahead, opening a dominant .897 lead as they went into their final discipline, the vault. The Russians hoped to claw back points on their final discipline, the floor exercise, but many of their team had already tearfully conceded defeat.
Seeking to seal their superiority, the darling of the USA team, Moceanu, pounded down the runway then landed, thump, on her backside. Gasps ran around the 32,048-strong Georgia Dome crowd. And then she did it again. Two jumps, two falls – the Russians were back in the battle. Strug was next: the final American to jump, the only one capable of winning gold for USA.
"When Dom fell the first time, I thought: 'No, I can't believe it. She never falls,'" Strug said later. "Then she fell a second time, and it was like: 'Forget this. This is a nightmare.' My heart was beating like crazy, knowing that it was now up to me. I thought: 'This is it, Kerri. You've done this vault a thousand times, so just go out and do it.'"
The atmosphere in the venue was taut and relentless. When the women's team had filed in earlier, a strobing of flashbulbs and a pulse of noise had hinted at the patriotic waves fuelling the crowd. On home soil and against Russians who, even post-Cold War, were still bogeymen, the largely US crowd were in full Stars and Stripes mode. Their entire focus all day – and that of the banks of press and phalanxes of TV cameras – was on the USA team hunting for gold. The Russians and Romanians existed on the sidelines, their routines, tumbles and twirls mere shadows on the edge of the main event. The Romania coach, Octavian Belu, spoke of having to "survive" the "heat, humidity and scoring" of the room.
It was into this, a bear-pit of crowd emotions, that Strug had to jump – a slight, wide-eyed teenager with a nation nervy and baying around her.
She set herself at the end of the strip, tense, nervous and with Moceanu's falls in the back of her mind. The cameras cut to her parents in the stands, her father's face set in stone before he clapped out a rhythm she could not possibly hear. She hurtled down the runway, handspringing, then spinning through the air, up and over the vault in a one-and-a-half twisting Yurchenko, before landing with a sickening crack on her ankle. Tumbling to the ground, wracked with pain, she remembered to finish her vault, standing to face the judges with a fixed grimace. Entirely alone, she then limped back along the runway as the pain swelled. She did not yet realise she had torn two ligaments in her ankle. "It hurt," she later said. "A lot."
When her score, 9.162, flashed up to gasps in the crowd, Karolyi and the USA team could not do the maths fast enough. They simply did not know if it would be enough to cling on to gold. The vault allows its competitors two attempts, with only the best result counting. With Strug's ankle swelling badly, Karolyi walked over.
"We got to go one more time," he told her.
"Do I have to do this again?" she asked.
"Can you?" said her coach.
"I don't know yet. I will do it, I will, I will." she replied.
Briefly, she whispered a prayer. "I asked Him to help me out," she revealed later. Then she set off down the runway again. "This is the Olympics," she later told reporters. "This is what you dream about from when you're five years old. I wasn't going to stop."
With the Russian gymnasts watching, Strug performed another back handspring on to the vault, twisting then crunching back down on to her injured ankle. Another crack, another lightning stab of pain. But this time she stayed upright, tucking her injured ankle behind her standing leg. She hopped for just long enough to salute the judges then, gently and delicately, knelt down on the mat before dragging herself away. A nod confirmed to her watching team the pain she was in before two coaches helped her, hopping and grimacing, to the sidelines. She wasn't even looking when the judges revealed her result: a gold medal-winning 9.712. She couldn't have known that the jump was unnecessary, that USA had already won the medal with her first vault.
Swept up into Karolyi's great bear-like arms – the coach who pushed her in private, but revelled in her triumph in public – she was carried to the podium, choking back tears. She collected her medal in an ankle brace, clinging to two team-mates for support. Pure grit, mental toughness and determination garnering its reward. Then those 30,000 watching at the Georgia Dome unleashed the national anthem like a primal roar.
"In my 35 years of coaching I have never seen such a moment," Karolyi said later. "People think these girls are fragile dolls. They're not. They're courageous."
Having helped the team to bronze in Barcelona, failing to qualify for the individual event in the process, Strug hoped against hope her ankle might recover for the singles competition this time. It wasn't to be – the vault would be her last act as a competitive gymnast.
She became a sensation. The quiet, feather-light girl from Tucson was interviewed on chat shows across the US, then phoned by President Clinton who told her she was "quite miraculous". She was pawed over by Hollywood executives desperate to buy up her story. "Her ankle may ache, but that girl is worth millions," said one. But, characteristically, she was the only girl in the team without an agent.
And then she turned away from it all. After a brief ice-skating tour, she took up the place she had won before the Olympics at the University of California. "I want to make sure I have my education," she said. Fittingly, she went on to become an elementary school teacher.
Unheralded, unremarkable and outshone by the stars around her before the Olympics, Kerri Strug emerged from the Atlanta Games as its hero, a burning example of the Olympic spirit. "It's not always who is the most popular or the best that wins," she later told a press conference determined to know how she had done it.
What the Guardian said
Thursday 25 July 1996
Richard Williams
Kerri Strug was carried from the podium with a bandage round her ankle and a gold medal round her neck after a moment of heart-stopping heroism had provided the climax to the United States team's victory in the women's team gymnastics event on Tuesday evening.
Although the splash of drama eventually turned out to be not quite what it had seemed, Strug, one of the less heralded members of the team of spring-loaded midgets in whom the dreams of suburban America are incarnated, gave us a lesson in courage and commitment that may not be surpassed here.
Strug, all 18 years, 4ft 9in and 6st 3lb of her, was the last member of her team to face the vault, the final piece of apparatus. Dominique Moceanu, the 14-year-old darling of the team, had just landed on her backside in both her attempts, giving the Americans their first seriously poor marks and threatening a collective heart attack for the 32,048 spectators in the Georgia Dome.
Starting the evening in second place behind the Russians after Sunday's compulsory session, the United States had quickly taken the lead, and the progress of Strug, Moceanu, Shannon Miller, Domninique Dawes, Jaycie Phelps, Amy Chow and Amanda Borden around the apparatus had already turned into a delirious lap of honour.
It was one of those nights when only the United States team seemed to exist in full colour, their star-spangled progress around the floor followed by all eyes in the packed Dome and by a posse of cameramen intent on capturing every hug, every tear. Maximising the psychological advantage, their coaches greeted each effort as if it were a masterpiece. The other three teams in the final session – the Russians, the Romanians and the Ukrainians – drifted around apparatus like ghosts, their faces drained of spirit and hope.
But so critical is the scoring in gymnastics that as Strug stood on the runway focusing herself and pushing the images of Moceanu's tumbles out of her mind, the gold medal suddenly seemed to depend on her alone.
A deep breath. A sprint. A running handstand and a leap from the springboard into a one-and-a-half twisting Yurchenko vault. And, this time, a landing which brought her too to earth. As she rose, wincing with pain and shaking her left leg, she looked at the scoreboard, which showed her a 9.1 and potential catastrophe.
She had heard something snap, she said later. "It hurt a lot." Later it was determined that she had suffered a third-degree lateral sprain of the left ankle.
You get two goes at the vault, and only the better one counts. If Strug was unclear on how to proceed, Bela Karolyi was there to prompt her. She said a prayer and again she sprinted, sprang, flipped and landed – this time square on both feet, although she quickly pulled the left one up and held the landing pose on her right foot only, grimacing with the pain. Then she tried to hop away, but collapsed on the mat.
The judges gave her 9.712. As it turned out, the United States would have won without it. But she had had no way of knowing that when she turned and ran in to face the pain of the last vault.
If you came to the Olympics to see pure grit, here it was. Though all gold medals are equal, Strug's will always have a slightly different glow.
