Joyner-Kersee, Louganis Are Honored by the USOC

Two former winners, heptathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee and diver Greg Louganis, were named Thursday as the United States Olympic Committee’s sportswoman and sportsman of the year for 1987.

Joyner-Kersee, 26, became the first woman to win the award two consecutive years. Louganis, 28, had previously won in 1982. Voting for the award, presented annually since 1974, is done by USOC officers, the Athletes Advisory Council and selected sportswriters and sportscasters.

With 57 other nominees in attendance, the winners were announced by Vice President George Bush at a ceremony in the Executive Office Building.

“As ours is the only Olympic Committee in the world that does not receive direct national government funding, it’s a tribute indeed to our athletes that the United States can be so well recognized when competing against the very best from all the other countries in the world,” Bush said.

“With the increased financial demands being placed on the U.S. Olympic Committee for the next Olympics, we’ve got to explore all kinds of ways of support for our athletes in their training, compatible with our democratic system.”

USOC officials are in Washington for meetings of the Executive Board and House of Delegates. On the agenda for today are the selection of either Atlanta or Minneapolis-St. Paul as the U.S. bid city for the 1996 Summer Olympics and a report from the site selection committee recommending the establishment of a training center in San Diego.

Joyner-Kersee, who lives in Long Beach and trains at UCLA, won gold medals at the track and field World Championships last year in Rome in the heptathlon and the long jump. Also in 1987, she tied the world record in the long jump at the Pan American Games in Indianapolis.

Louganis, who lives in Malibu when he is not training at Mission Bay, Fla., finished second in all three events, the 1-meter, 3-meter and platform, at the 1987 national indoor championships but responded with victories in the 3-meter and platform competition at the U.S. Olympic Festival and the Pan American Games.

Louganis gave Bush a set of U.S. team pins from the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, and Joyner-Kersee gave the Vice President a U.S. warm-up outfit.

“You’ll see me running around in this--slowly,” Bush told Joyner-Kersee.