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You would
have missed it if you blinked. Kerri's final vault in the 1996
Olympics was over in a split second, but the fanfare goes on and on.
Some people marvel that Kerri became a star so fast, but the truth
is that few dreams come true in the wink of an eye.
Kerri always called
Growing up with an older
brother and sister meant there was always something happening. All
three of them were active in sports, and Kerri's mom was kept busy
carting everyone back and forth to practices and games.
The first to fall in love with
gymnastics was Lisa, the oldest. She started competing when she was
8 years old, before Kerri was even born. A few years later, Kerri
declared that she wanted to be just like her older sister, and she
was soon enrolled in a "Mom and Tot's" gymnastics class.
When she was 8, Kerri competed
in her first meet. She worked hard and quickly reached higher and
higher levels. Looking back, Kerri says her move up the gymnastics
ladder was something that just seemed to happen naturally.
Then came a day when Kerri had
to decide just how much she loved gymnastics. When she was 12, the
Olympics no longer seemed like an impossible dream, but she knew she
wouldn't make it without a good coach. That coach was Bela Karolyi,
and Kerri couldn't train with him unless she left
"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."
Kerri headed for Bela's
Houston-based gym in January 1991. She was 13 years old.
Karolyi lived up to his
reputation for being tough. Kerri worked out 6 to 7 days a week, 8
hours a day. When she and the other girls were training, Bela
demanded complete obedience, both in and out of the gym. Bela and
his wife, Martha, watched everything from what they ate to when they
slept.
While Kerri was training, she
lived with a series of host families. To ease the transition, the
families usually had at least one child involved in gymnastics.
Although Kerri was still very young, she was basically living on her
own. Her parents were hundreds of miles away. "It was very hard at times,"
she says. "When you got down or had a bad day, you got to a phone
and talked to your parents a lot."
Luckily, Kerri was not entirely
alone in
Such run of the mill treats may
not seem like a big deal, but back then Kerri had very little time
to herself. In some ways, she traded her childhood for gymnastics.
"A gymnast's career is pretty
short. Most of them will peak at 15 or 16," she said when she was 14
years old. "When I get through with this, I have the rest of my life
to do all those other things. This means too much to me."
As the Barcelona Olympics
loomed closer, all of the work and sacrifices Kerri made seemed
worth it. The last day of the Olympic Trials was held in
The final rotation of the
optional competition was the floor exercise, one of Kerri's best
events. Sitting in the stadium, we felt confident she would make the
team, but then disaster struck. Kerri fell.
Because gymnasts are taught not
to keep track of the scores during competition, Kerri had little
idea how she was doing when she fell. For a while, she was certain
she didn't make the cut, but when all was said and done, she landed
the fourth slot on a six person team. Kerri Strug became the
youngest
Kerri's time in
Life became very uncertain after the Olympics in 1992. She didn't think she would compete long enough to make the 1996 team, and she was looking forward to a life that didn't revolve around gymnastics. Nevertheless, Kerri couldn't seem to get the sport out of her system, and soon after the Olympics, she set out to find a new coach.
She spent 3 years bouncing from
one gym to another. Kerri wasn't sure what she was looking for, but
nothing felt right. No one could push her to her limits the way Bela
had, and she didn't feel comfortable with any coaching style. In 3
years, Kerri trained with 3 coaches. Each new coach meant a move
across the country, a new host family, and a new school.
The last straw came at a meet
in
School became Kerri's focus
when she moved back to
While Kerri was away from home,
however, she had devote so much time to working out that she had to
make special arrangements for school. For years she had an
abbreviated schedule. She attended classes three hours a day and
trained in the morning and afternoon. She squeezed homework in
before bed and on weekends.
When Kerri returned home, life
slowly got back to normal. She went to school like a normal
teenager, and she spent time with her family and friends. She
continued to work out, but her training schedule wasn't nearly as
strict as it once was.
Kerri was just beginning to
compete again when another blow rocked her gymnastics career. She
entered a small meet in
She was on the uneven bars when
her grip slipped and she swung backwards off the bar. When Kerri hit
the mat, her legs bounced over her head, severely pulling her back
muscles. It was a very painful injury, but it could have been much
worse. It took Kerri another 6 months to fully recover.
Dealing with injuries and
setbacks is something all athletes face. Sometimes it was hard to
keep going, but Kerri always managed to plow past the problems.
"A lot of times I thought about
all the work I put into it, and I didn't want to blow it after I had
gotten so close." More than once this philosophy pushed Kerri to try
one more time when things went wrong.
In 1995, Kerri graduated from
her hometown high school and realized that the Olympics were just
over the horizon. Three years earlier she had missed her chance to
compete in the All-Around competition by .001, and she had something
to prove to herself. She wanted a second chance to make her dreams
come true.
Kerri had been accepted at
UCLA, but she knew she couldn't give both college and gymnastics her
full attention. She worked hard to graduate high school a year ahead
of schedule, and this gave her the cushion she needed to put college
off a year. Once Kerri made this decision, she knew it was time to
return to Karolyi's gym.
In 1994, Bela had come out of
retirement to coach 1992 Olympian Kim Zmeskal and a new prodigy,
Dominique Moceanu. Returning to Karolyi wouldn't be the easiest
path, but Kerri hoped he would be able to get her back on track.
An
Kerri rode the wave of good
fortune all the way to the Olympic Trials in
How did Kerri celebrate this
huge accomplishment? Bela gave her one night off and she spent it
with her family, sneaking a few bites of pizza. Even with so much to
be happy about, Kerri remembered to pick the cheese off the pizza so
it wouldn't be quite so sinful.
In the three weeks before the
Olympics, Kerri learned that an unexpected twist in strategy would
give her a real shot at the Olympic All-Around competition, her
ultimate goal.
During each rotation in a
gymnastics meet, the scores start low and go up. For instance, if
there are six girls competing on the vault, and the first girl and
the last girl each do very good routines, it is likely that the last
girl will get a higher score than the first girl. Judges do this to
ensure they have room to maneuver in case someone does a spectacular
routine.
Usually coaches want to save
their best athletes for the last positions, but they want solid
performances in the beginning as well. Historically, coaches placed
Kerri, who was always considered to be a very reliable performer, in
one of the earlier slots of a rotation.
At the Atlanta Olympics,
however, head coach Martha Karolyi and assistant coach Mary Lee
Tracy decided to take a new approach. Rather than keeping the same
old seating chart, they decided it would be more equitable to base
order solely on performance at the Olympic Trials. This meant Kerri
took the enviable anchor position on both floor exercise and vault!
Well, Kerri Strug did make the All-Around competition in the 1996 Olympics. Who knows what might have happened had she not been injured?
It took a while for Kerri to realize that her
last vault said more than any medal could. It declared that not only
is Kerri among the best gymnasts in the world, but she is also
strong-willed and brave. Gymnastics is a fleeting ambition, but the
qualities Kerri displayed on
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The Wink of an Eye
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