Authors: Ginny Gilder
In the time it took to row from the finish line to the dock, I had to decide whether I could put aside my crushed dream of stardom in the women's single and accept an alternate vision: reform myself into a team rower and compete for a position in the quad. If so, I had ten minutes to transform from a prima donna into an affable, easy-enough-going contributor who wouldn't insist on being the center of the universe, who could respond to direction from an unfamiliar coach and a take-charge coxswain, act like racing in the quad was her hands-down first choice, give up her solo dreams, and smile through her grit-toothed disappointment.
I hated losing. But I hadn't lost it all yet: the single was gone, but the Olympics remained within reach.
My earliest training in buck up and shut up served me well once again. When I landed at the dock, I was all smiles. I congratulated Carlie Geer, the winner. I mingled with the rest of the finalists, comparing notes about our racing. At Harry's insistence, I finally disclosed to John Van Blom the injury that had derailed my racing. At least the pressure was off. I had landed with a bump back in the familiar land of underdog. I knew the rules of engagement in this territory.
But I still didn't know what the damage was, because I'd refused a diagnosis before the trials. Now, however, I needed to know the score. Selection camp started in less than forty-eight hours. The Olympic Games were less than three months away. John would not choose an athlete whose injury had no chance of healing well in time.
The day after the trials, I visited a sports medicine doctor in Los Angeles. He took X-rays and, showing me the little white line, said, “You have a broken rib under your right arm.”
“What? How long will it take to heal?”
“Oh, probably a couple of months.”
“Can I row on it anyway?”
“Broken bones need inactivity to heal.”
“No way. The selection camp starts tomorrow!”
“Well, you're not the only elite athlete who's injured. Many of our best athletes won't be competing in Los Angeles this summer.”
The hell with that. I am going to LA. Forgetting my manners, I stomped out of his office and called Harry. After consultations with his local medical team, he called me back with their prognosis: the rib would heal with rest. I needed some time, but I would be ready by August. I just had to convince John Van Blom.
Harry helped there too. He talked with John. Given what I had put him through, I couldn't believe Harry would sing my praises, but he made a sufficiently convincing case for putting me in the boat. I was one of two American women currently competing who had won a medal as a sculler. I'd proven myself, despite my showing at the trials.
I must have done something right during the camp to bolster Harry's argument, because I made the team. By a squeak. John took the women who had come in second, third, fourth, and fifth in the trials: Lisa Rhode, Anne Marden, Joan Lind, and me.
For the next month, I rowed in the bow seat, rehabbed my broken rib, and made the necessary mental adjustment to team-boat dynamics. We traveled to Lucerne to race in the pre-Olympic regatta with Marden stroking. When we returned in late June, John switched us and put me in the stroke seat. My physical rehabilitation was complete. But my short-lived confidence had abandoned me.
“What if” governed me. What if I got injured? What if my asthma kicked up again? What if I wasn't strong enough, fit enough, tough enough? What if I didn't want it enough? No matter how hard I trained, how many personal bests I recorded on my weight charts, my timed runs, my stadium reps, my ergometer tests, I felt the hot breath of my fear on my neck and heard its disbelieving voice rumble at me. Enough was never enough.
15
On July 28, standing in the tunnel at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, about to step onstage and join the opening ceremonies of the XXIII Olympiad, I heard the roar of ninety-one thousand voices. So much had happened since I started dreaming of joining the ranks of Olympic competitors in 1976, and it wasn't all about me. A mere twelve years since the passage of Title IX in the United States, female participation in athletic events was gathering steam worldwide. Women's rowing had become an Olympic sport in 1976, but now, fifty-six years after doctors had asserted that women who ran the eight-hundred-meter event in track would “become old too soon,” the International Olympic Committee had added the women's marathon and the women's individual road race (cycling) to the LA event roster.
The times were changing even faster now. In 1900, a total of 22 women worldwide competed for the first time in the Olympics. In 1928, the year before my mother was born, 290 female athletes competed in Amsterdam. In 1956, two years before she gave birth to me, 376 women participated in Melbourne, an increase of less than 30 percent since my mother's birth. Now, another 28 years later, over 1,500 women would be competing under their nation's colors in LA, a growth of over 400 percent. Women would comprise 23 percent of the athletes in LA, despite the absence of nearly the entire Soviet Bloc, as compared to less than 15 percent twelve years earlier, and about 2 percent in 1900.
More than 6,800 athletes from 140 countries (an Olympic record), including 1,566 women (of course, another Olympic record), ready to compete in 23 sports comprised the main attraction of these opening ceremonies. The vast majority had preceded the American contingent of 500-plus and now filled the track. As the host country, the US team would enter the stadium last, which meant that our athletes waited three-and-a-half hours for the privilege and missed most of the occasion. At our nearby offsite location, we overheard strains of the theme from
Chariots of Fire
that opened the ceremony. We were missing the biggest audience participation event ever attempted in Olympic history, when all attendees turned over the placards placed on their seats and held them over their heads at the same moment to produce a tableau weaving together the national flags of every country attending the Games.
But I didn't mind. I was here. After four years, three more hours was no problem.
The energy was palpable; we were about to march into a love fest, and I couldn't wait. Wearing our Levi Strauss opening ceremonies uniformsâtrim, close-fitting, red, white, and blue athletic jackets with matching blue pants edged with white pipingâUS team members buzzed with excitement, practically pawing at the ground to get going. Sporting baseball caps, wearing funny sunglasses, and waving tiny American flags, we entered the stadium cheering wildly, laughing, and absorbing the audience's adulation. No one thought of the fourteen Eastern Bloc countries that had absented themselves in a copycat boycott, or of Iran and Libya, which didn't attend for their own political reasons. It was a moment for happiness and celebration, to luxuriate in connection and joy engendered by a communal gathering focused on a pure purpose. It was time to revel in the excitement for all that awaited observers in the coming days: the inspiration and awe of witnessing otherwise ordinary people attempt extraordinary physical feats that would stretch them to their limits with grace, grit, and humility.
As I walked beside Kathy Keeler and Hope Barnes, well in the middle of the American pack behind the United States banner, I cried and laughed. All the hard work fell away: the memories of sitting alone in my single at dawn on late fall mornings, kneading warmth back into
icy hands so I could grasp my oars properly; waking up in the dark to run stadiums on frozen winter mornings; skipping showers after evening workouts to squeeze in extra sleep; devouring muffins and yogurt on the run as I rushed to work; the disappointment of falling short, losing races, getting cut, being injured; the joy of my successes. All those pieces to my puzzle had come together and landed me here. Any residual bitterness from the 1980 boycott evaporated as I felt the love and excitement that permeated the Coliseum. We were here. I had finally made it to the Olympic Games as a participant.
I watched Rafer Johnson, dressed in pristine white track shorts and a matching racing singlet, take the torch that over thirty-five hundred runners had transported across the United States from the Moscow Olympics. He carried it up a steep staircase into the upper reaches of the Coliseum. It took a moment for the flame to travel from the torch to the giant urn. Then it lit. The Olympic Games were officially open. My wait was over.
The following two weeks flashed by in an instant, packed with peak life experiences that clambered over each other like a pack of puppies. The status and glory conferred on Olympians gave me a brief stardom: athlete credentials identifying me as autograph bait and granting me entry to every Olympic venue; housing in the Santa Barbara Olympic Village during the rowing competition, with access to a revolutionary messaging service that any world citizen could use to send best wishes to any Olympic athlete; surrounded by an international cast of characters and feted with an impressive range of domestic and foreign food choices; daily jaunts to the beach across the street from the Olympic complex for a quick dip in the gentle surf of the Pacific; the beauty of Lake Casitas, the Olympic rowing venue, deep blue water surrounded by the stark brown desert hills of Ojai, far from the California coast; and, of course, finally the opportunity to race in the premier event of my beloved sport.
The field for the women's quadruple sculls with coxswain event was narrow, with only seven teams: Canada, Denmark, France, Italy, Romania, West Germany, and the United States. The heats consisted of two races, one with three crews and the other with four. The winner of each heat progressed directly to the final. The remaining five boats would race in one repechage, with the top-four crews proceeding to
the final. Ideally, we would win our heat on Monday and earn our slot in the finals without having to race on Wednesday, when the five losing crews would compete for the four remaining final spots. At the same time, I couldn't help but ponder the pros and cons of racing three times instead of twice. If we didn't win our heat and had to race in the reps, we would gain experience for the final and adjust both to the course and to the pressure that came with competing at the highest level. The trade-off for valuable experience, however, could prove costly. An extra race meant risking the chance of something bizarre occurring at the wrong time and knocking us out of the final. It meant expending additional precious energy to reach the final. No way would John Van Blom consider a strategy that sent our crew through the repechage to win a medal.
After perusing the entries for the women's quad, I indulged myself with a peek at the entries for the women's single. Carlie Geer was one of a field of sixteen. There would be heats, repechages, and semifinals to determine the top six scullers who would compete for the medals. Carlie would race at least three times. The East German and Soviet women who had finished ahead of me and taken gold and silver the previous year at Duisburg were no-shows, victims of the boycott. Carlie had a great shot at gold. My gold.
It still stung.
I liked and respected my boatmates. Racing with them was much easier psychologically than going to the line alone. The presence of a competent coxswain also reduced the pressure. I didn't have to steer or manage the race plan, nor problem solve alone if the ratio felt off or the cadence was wrong. I simply had to follow directions and execute our race plan with authority and confidence.
But I had learned to manage my pre-race jitters on my own, to back into a stake boat by myself, to call my own race strategy, and to impel my top performance at my own behest. Every time I raced in my single, I proved again my resilience to my toughest criticâmyself. And I loved rowing alone, feeling my shell glide through the water under my own power.
Rowing in the quad didn't bring the same level of challenge or satisfaction. I didn't say those words out loud, but I knew. Of course I was thrilled to have made the Olympic team, to have landed in the
stroke seat, and to compete. The fact remained: I was not rowing in the premier sculling event. I had no one to blame but myself, but that didn't change a thing. I was jealous.
Several of my family flew out for the Games. My mother chose the Olympics as her first race to attend, Peggy represented my siblings, and my father came without BG to divert his attention, accompanied instead by a film crew to commemorate the event. He'd engaged the crew earlier in the summer to film the trials in Long Beach, capturing that travesty on tape, so the guys knew me well by now. Josh was there, too, along with his parents, who were celebrating their daughter's success.
Races were held early in Ojai to beat the late-morning winds that ruffled the pristine reservoir waters of Lake Casitas. Thirty-six hours after opening ceremonies, we launched to race in the qualifying round. Our Monday morning heat ended in a nail-biter with a photo finish: after our crew crossed the line pretty much simultaneously with the Danes, long moments ticked by before the results flashed on the screen. The finish-line photo showed that our bow ball (the rubber attachment affixed to the pointy front end of every rowing shell to prevent injury in the event of a crash) had crossed the line a whopping one one-hundredth of a second ahead. We qualified for the finals without needing a trip to the reps.
After the first race, my mother erupted in uncharacteristic joy. I accompanied her to a restaurant that afternoon for lunch. Televisions were positioned in the room's corners, all sporting ABC's Olympic coverage. Our heat from hours earlier came on the screen, and my mother started shouting, “That's my daughter!” I shrank in my seat as other diners turned to look. Several people stopped by and offered their congratulations, all of which my mother accepted with pride. She had never held an oar, but now she acted like she'd been in the boat the entire race.
On Saturday morning, finals day, the sun rose into a cloudless desert sky. I woke to the usual race-day anxiety gnawing at my confidence. The forty-minute drive from the Olympic Village to the course in the quiet company of my teammates gave me time to force down some bites of banana and drink some water. We arrived early enough to allow my PRTs to work their way through my system and cleanse
me of any extra baggage. Then I took a jog along the lakeshore to shake out some of my nerves.