THE STATE OF U.S. WOMEN’S GYMNASTICS : 7 Months Before Seoul, Turmoil Would Seem to Be Best Word for It

There are seven months remaining before the Summer Olympics at Seoul, South Korea, so the story stands to get even more complicated and, possibly, sensational. But here it is so far:

The country’s best hope for gold, apparently gone to fat (or maybe just womanhood), jumps gymnastic’s idol maker for the 1984 Olympic coach, snide remarks to follow; the 1988 Olympic coach, surprised by the politics that others regard as commonplace, suddenly resigns, snide remarks to follow; the 1984 Olympic coach somewhat unexpectedly and reluctantly becomes the 1988 Olympic coach.

New Olympic coach, top gymnast and all, girds for a long campaign and sighs (he, at least, is above snide): “The news really made my wife’s day.”

In any other sport, these events, which happened within a week of each other last month, might signal alarm. But women’s gymnastics is every bit as resilent as these flexible fliers themselves. Understand that for a week every four years, this may be one of the most beautiful and amazing sports, its development and perfection of human motion, the most unlikely kinds in fact, become athletics’ highest achievement. The rest of the quadrennium, however, it’s a melodramatic mess.

Can you believe that the sport that values precision above all else is born of such apparent chaos? You should.

Concerning Kristie Phillips, who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated at the age of 14, on the move at 16, we will try to damp aforementioned alarm. This is business as usual after all. Maybe not good, maybe bad in fact, but certainly within the traditions of women’s gymnastics.

In the 1984 Olympics, the women’s second-place finish was predated by a similar sudden move. Julianne McNamara, who would later win a bronze medal on uneven bars and a silver in floor exercise, left Olympic Coach Don Peters’ SCATS academy in Huntington Beach for idol maker Bela Karolyi’s Houston plant. Phillips’ move should hereafter be known in gymnastic circles as a reverse-McNamara.

“It’s nothing we encourage,” says Mike Jacki, executive director of the United States Gymnastics Federation, “it causes a lot of turmoil in a kid’s life. You’d hate for them to think they had to move from Bangor, Me., to Southern California because they thought that’s what they had to do to make the team. Yet you look back on 1984 and every athlete in the top 10 except Michelle Dusserre made a change.”

Jacki explains that a girl’s gymnastic life span has the comparative duration of a strobe light. Timing, thus, is everything. “It’s a terrible thing to say, but a girl’s birth date is probably more important than her athletic abilities,” he says. “The window is so small, it takes such precision to fly through it, you can’t blame them for looking for every edge as you get closer to the Olympics.”

There is truth to that. Phillips, because she turned 12 at the beginning of the quadrennium, was well positioned to achieve an athletic peak at its end. Yet, given the demands of the sport on a changing physiology, there is virtually no hope that there will ever be another quadrennium for her. Will she compete at 20? Did Mary Lou Retton? So, of course, there is an urgency at hand.

But is there more involved than that? In Phillips’ case, we must consider her early success, a vicious backlash and a couple of surprisingly bad performances. We must consider also that she was being coached by Karolyi, who is known for his phenom-fix. The Romanian defector tends to have top stars, some feel at the expense of all others. Romania’s Nadia Comaneci, America’s Mary Lou Retton--gold medal winners both--in a gym of sulking also-rans.

The perceived intelligence on this matter is that Phillips had outlived her precocity and became simply one of a number of top gymnasts. A sulking also-ran, in other words, suddenly on the fringe of some younger phenom’s glare. A discard. The thinking is that Phillips, despite an intense media buildup, didn’t come up with the goods and Karolyi, who had already packaged her with a New York agency, moved on to other projects--Rhonda Faehn, Phoebe Mills. And Phillips moved on.

It’s true that Phillips had an awful meet at the World Championships last October. After two years of winning everything she entered, she limped out of the World Championships with a 45th-place finish. SCATS’ Sabrina Mar had totaled her in the Pan Am Games before that. What a sport, to be washed up at 16. Is that possible?

Karolyi claims to retain confidence in his former star, to believe that she remains a medal hope, especially on the balance beam. Yet he hints at her lack of confidence and her changing size: “Kids don’t leave when they are stable, chicken of big competitions or getting upset when somebody else is getting a little more attention,” he says.

Also: “Kids are having hard times at 16, puberty really giving them major problems. They are growing in all directions, sideways, too.”

Karolyi’s wife, Martha, also a coach, explained it rather more unkindly for USA Today: “She also has had some problems (with her weight), mostly because her heredity is not the best. Her mother is quite heavy.”

They play for keeps in this game.

There are hints, however, that Phillips, though she has grown from 4-9 to 5-1, was not well-prepared for that meet, and it didn’t have much to do with genes. Then-national team coach Greg Marsden, culled from the college ranks and asked to unite a divided sport, remembers that: “Kristie was wholly not prepared. She wasn’t physically prepared. I had calls from her mother complaining Bela was not preparing her and what could she do.

“All I can tell you is, at the World Championships, I sat in a room with Kristie and she cried because she had given her heart and soul for two years, helped him maintain his reputation and media exposure and now he had abandoned her.”

Karolyi, in fact, had not attended the World Championships, complaining that he wouldn’t show up if he wasn’t allowed on the floor. However, Marsden says, all the other coaches were there.

Others, however, regard Phillips’ poor performance as just a blip. Mike Jacki, though he understands the Phillips backlash in a sport where the jealousy is professional, says: “It’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s like Walter Payton has one bad game and you wash him out. She did have a bad event. But that can happen. She’s still one of our best kids, if not our best. I think she really got a bum rap.”

The search for the next Mary Lou Retton, which had seemed to stop with Kristie after a pair of American Cup wins, may not yield anybody this time around. There may not be that superstar the sport seems to demand, or create. “It’s a more balanced team,” says Don Peters, “with no clear-cut leaders.”

Agrees Jacki: “There’s no Mary Lou Retton, but overall there’s better balance, a real strong pool of talent.”

So Phillips is now training quietly in Southern California, trying to recoup her greatness. Don Peters says, besides recovering from health problems and possibly poor conditioning, Phillips must undergo some fundamental retooling. “There are some technical things she needed to get straightened out, weaknesses here and there that just caught up with her. She has a lot of work to do.” To do that work, Peters is holding her out of the American Cup later this month.

Karolyi, meanwhile, is pretending to be blase about it. “It was her decision,” he says of the defection, “She needed a change, according to her. This is not unusual. Sometimes it works out, sometimes not. I believe always, kids when they seek a new place, let them go. Just let them go. I did mention to Kristie that these moves sometimes are working out unfortunately. I have to mention it.”

Peters says: “I’ve never believed it was a good idea to hop from club to club, because of the potential inconsistencies. But in certain instances, it may be productive. Remember when Julianne McNamara went to Karolyi? I think it ended up being a good move. She had been unhappy, struggling at a key time. She needed to make a change. It was frustrating for us at the time and I didn’t perceive it as the best move. But . . . you’re getting stale, the coaches are telling you the same things.”

But Kristie Phillips is just one battlefield in this contentious sport. Never mind who’s coaching her. Who’s coaching the United States?

Well, it’ll be Peters again, but that was not the original plan. The USGF had hoped to come up with a coach that wouldn’t have a potential gymnast and thus resolve the differences that tend to crop up when an athlete’s coach becomes the national team coach as well. Peters, for example, has a financially and professionally vested interest in the athletes he trains at SCATS, as many as five who are considered Olympic prospects. Now Peters has a reputation for absolute fairness, to the point, Marsden says, where he may “hurt his own athletes.” Yet he, or any other private coach, is vulnerable to complaints from the rival private coaches, all who base income and reputation on decisions a business rival makes.

Marsden, the coach at Utah, was thus an inspired choice as national team coach. He was above the bickering, had no personal or private agenda, could remain above the fray. He was given authority to develop a gymnastics program, from junior level on up, and develop it as he saw fit.

The USGF had been naive, of course. Just because Marsden was above the fray didn’t mean there still wasn’t one. Coaches still complained about athlete selection, coaching selections, you name it. Jacki says: “Maybe Greg felt his power and authority should not be questioned. But, that still didn’t eliminate controversy.”

Marsden was surprised to find so much of it generated by the Establishment itself. A week before he was to lead his team to Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for the World Championships, he says, Jackie Fie, the International Gymnastics Federation vice president, was lobbying for a different assistant coach. “Basically, everybody felt they were still in power,” Marsden said.

“I think they really do want someone to provide direction. The coaches unanimously supported me but the problem was that the administration didn’t support me at all. They succumbed to the media pressure from Bela. Which is funny because he supported me until I was appointed. Then suddenly he became my biggest critic. The reason, he thought if we were friendly, I would select him as the assistant coach.”

When he didn’t, Marsden believes Karolyi did little to help the program and even “appeared to sabotage our efforts.” He cites examples when Karolyi failed to accompany his athletes to the Pan American Games and the World Championships.

“He’s acting like no one wants him involved, whining on TV. I had tickets for him, a per diem. I was waiting for him at the airport.” Marsden points out, further, that after the Pan Am Games, Karolyi sent his athletes to Australia “with a Class II coach for two days while he goes hunting in Alaska. Maybe I don’t know enough about international gymnastics, like he says, but if I did that with the NCAA Championships two weeks away (as were the World Championships), I’d be fired.”

Marsden eventually despaired after some committees met and voted to abridge his authority. He resigned and let the job go to Peters who had been named successor in the unlikely event, etc. Peters was not initially thrilled but says, “Now I’m kind of excited again.”

Peters admits “it will be kind of tough,” starting at this late date. Marsden, who did not get his commission until the quadrennium was well under way, may not have had much of a chance. Peters has even more backtracking to do. The compulsory exercises at Rotterdam, for example, were a disaster for the U.S. team. They had been a disaster after the 1983 World Championships, too, but Peters had the ability and time to organize a widespread effort to correct them then.

The U.S. team, which had been three points behind Romania after compulsories in the 1983 World Championships, corrected to the point where they were virtually even by the Olympics. Does Peters have time to similarly correct this team’s deficiencies?

Marsden has put his failed effort behind him and now observes the program from afar. He feels, as does everybody in gymnastics, that a neutral coach is necessary. Still, he doesn’t despair of the program as is.

“We have great coaches, great athletes and better facilities,” he says, “Numbers? Look at Romania, the size of Connecticut. Don’t tell me we can’t be competitive. Unfortunately, we’re more interested in fighting with each other than competing.”

Well, nothing so wrong about that either, he says. “Bickering, arguing, that’s a part of competitiveness,” he says. “But when it comes time to come together, we have to put our personal agenda aside. If Bela wants to take a shot at me, or if Don and Bela have problems, no big deal. But when the Olympics come, somebody has to say, ‘But I have a bigger problem with the Russians.’ ”

It is encouraging to note that something good usually comes of this seeming chaos. At least it has in the past. Kristie Phillips may recover her luster, her spark and shine in the Olympics. Don Peters may yet galvanize the movement, as he did before. And down in Houston, it is said, Bela Karolyi is working with a youngster from the junior program, Chelle Stack. He plans to unveil her later this month in the American Cup, the event Phillips used to win.