A Victory That Led to a Calamity

A case could be made for a lot of events as the turning points in sports history, 1984, occurrences that triggered changes in the way things turned out in our little corner of the human drama.

Let me give you one of my candidates.

First of all, let us concede that one of the truly historic episodes of the year was the on-track collision of runners Zola Budd and Mary Decker in the Olympics at the Coliseum in August.

By anyone’s reckoning, that was one of the athletic disasters of any season.

Come with me now to the afternoon of June 24 and we will examine the seeds of that calamity, the sequence without which it might never have happened.

To set the stage, Mary Decker on this date had already won her 3,000-meter Olympic trial, a customary wire-to-wire, bury-the-opposition performance in which she coasted home in front by a city block and nearly seven seconds.

As she lined up for the 1,500 the next day, the world expected a repeat performance. Decker was merely tuning up for a most spectacular double in women’s Olympic history. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. Decker had not lost to an American runner since 1980. With the defection of the Russians and other Eastern Bloc teams, such a double was entirely possible, the number of heats needed being substantially curtailed.

No one paid much attention to the girl in the Team Brooks jersey, wearing No. 139. Ruth Wysocki had finished a dazzling 11th behind Mary in their most recent matchup at UCLA in May. Her personal best at the distance was an elephant-walk 4:13.25, compared with Decker’s 3:59.

Then, there were people who were not even sure who this Ruth was. That’s because she had been Ruth Kleinsasser when she began running in her childhood, and she had been Ruth Caldwell when she beat Decker in an AAU 800 in 1978. As Ruth Wysocki, she had all but given up running in favor of clerking in an electronics office. Then a roadrunner named Tom Wysocki, her new husband, persuaded her to give up answering other people’s telephones and get back on track.

For one afternoon last June, she became the most famous Ruth since Babe. She beat the incomparable Decker, the Queen Mary of track and field, by sweeping past her in the stretch of the 1,500 with a dazzling 4:00.1, a clocking that lopped more than 12 seconds off her previous best and nipped Mary Decker by daylight.

This had an interesting and immediate repercussion: It prompted Decker to announce that she would not run two events in the Olympics. She would forswear the 1,500 in favor of putting all her hopes in one basket for the Olympics, the 3,000.

It not only set the stage for one of the most famous falls in sports history, it may have made it inevitable. It may have been only hindsight, but a number of Decker’s competitors, including Wysocki, reported that the events in the trials seemed to have unsettled Decker. They had never seen her as tense and pressured as she appeared at the Olympics, they said. She seemed to be, as they say, riding for a fall.

Of course, she had her great fall.

Now, it would be nice to say that Wysocki picked up the challenge and had an Olympics that would result in a ticker-tape parade, a Sports Illustrated cover and maybe a Sullivan Award.

Alas! The clock struck midnight for Wysocki, too. She didn’t do anything spectacular, like run up on Zola Budd’s ankles. She just finished sixth and eighth in her two specialties, the 800 and 1,500, hardly the kind of double she was hoping for.

Wysocki is not sure what happened. First of all, she found people counting on her. “I felt people would hate me if I didn’t win.” she said. “I felt the press would be asking me these accusing questions as to why I had let everyone down. Now that I had beaten Decker, it seemed to me it was up to me to do everything she was supposed to do and I knew it was asking too much of myself.”

Next there was the problem of tribal esteem. Ruth, for some reason, got it into her head that foreigners were superior. Reason should have told her none of them had beaten Decker at the World Cup, but reason was not in the starting blocks, Ruth was.

“I had always had this thing in my mind, I was in awe of the Europeans,” she said. “I don’t know why, exactly. It’s just that they seemed somehow, well, superior. I mean, they could speak another language and had all this great track tradition.”

It was an inbred notion that would have astonished, say, Carl Lewis or Edwin Moses. But Ruth had to live with it.

Until she got to Europe later in the summer.

“I had run bad tactical races in the Olympics because of my overawe of the Europeans,” she said. The Italian winner in the 1,500 ran three seconds slower than Wysocki’s Olympic trial time.

In Europe, Wysocki buckled down. She ran in seven meets. She won four of them. She beat Olympic winner Gabriella Dorio in one. She ran a 4:21 mile in London. Just having an Italian or English accent didn’t make you fast, she found out.

Wysocki will meet up with Decker for the first time since the Olympic trials in the Sunkist Invitational at the L.A. Sports Arena on Friday night, Jan. 18. The distance will be 2,000 meters.

If Decker wins this time, there will be small consolation. If someone congratulates her, she may reply, “I know--but if I’d beaten her last June, I might have gone in the 1,500 in the Games and that way nobody would ever have heard of Zola Budd!”