Dismount Leaves Gym Coaches Out of Position : With Peters’ Resignation, Karolyi, 3 Others to Share Duties on Olympic Floor

The United States Gymnastics Federation has had so much trouble picking and keeping a coach for the women’s Olympic team that it decided Tuesday, in the wake of Don Peters’ sudden resignation, to do away with the troublesome position altogether.

Instead, each of the six gymnasts will be coached by her own personal coach, even on the Olympic floor, when the USGF’s two credentials will be rotated among four or more coaches. Three of the gymnasts who made the team from last week’s trials are from Bela Karolyi’s Houston camp. The three other gymnasts represent individual clubs.

This is apparent anarchy, but it will be nothing compared with the procedure that established one national coach and one Olympic training camp. Since adopting that straightforward procedure, the USGF has been awash in controversy, much if not most of it stirred by Karolyi, who was furious at producing half the team and getting none of the credit.

Greg Marsden, coach at the University of Utah who had no private interests in the sport, had resigned the position earlier this year, citing lack of USGF support. And then Peters, the national coach from 1981 to 1985, who replaced Marsden in a close vote earlier this year, abruptly resigned Monday.

Peters’ position became untenable when it developed that the team would be made up primarily of Karolyi’s gymnasts. Phoebe Mills, Brandy Johnson and Chelle Stack earned three of the first six spots, and Rhonda Faehn and Kristie Phillips qualified as alternates. Peters, who coached the 1984 Olympic team, provided none from his SCATS team in Huntington Beach. His two best gymnasts had withdrawn with injuries.

Immediately after the trials last weekend at Salt Lake City, Karolyi’s athletes were openly campaigning for Karolyi and journalists were asking a surprised Peters if he would step down. He later did.

According to Mike Jacki, USGF’s executive director, this is really what the sport wanted all along.

“Keep in mind that the original plan, put forth in February and approved, was before we decided to pick the team at the trials,” he said. “The idea then was to pick the team at training camp.”

If the team was to have been selected at a training camp, which had been scheduled next week at Peters’ club, it obviously would have helped to have a national coach. However, individual coaches objected to their athletes “sitting on pins and needles” and the executive committee reversed itself in March. “They didn’t want the athletes selected by a dart board,” Jacki said.

Instead the USGF decided everything was to be “performance related.” This originally meant the athletes and their placing on the team, but Peters grew increasingly to believe that it referred to the coaching as well.

Jacki always insisted that Karolyi, and individual coaches in general, would participate in the Olympic coaching. “And Don does like to have complete control,” Jacki said, explaining his lack of support for Peters, although Peters had told him he would involve the individual coaches.

“That meeting was premature,” he said. “Had we waited, picked a coach on performance, we’d have come up with a different program.”

Karolyi, from his gym in Houston, now apparently the site of a brief training camp before the gymnasts leave for Seoul, said: “I was always bleeding for that. It suddenly opens opportunity for all individuals.”

Karolyi said that Jacki had immediately asked him to step in to be the Olympic coach but said: “If asked to take over, I will not accept. And please do not even try to assign another one. I believe it is an ill concept and should be dropped forever. It is nothing but a disturbance.”

Jacki said he never asked Karolyi to become coach but that he did call him after Peters’ resignation. “I said, ‘What’s your suggestion?’ ” Jacki said. “I said, ‘Everybody’s going to ask if you’re going to be the coach.’ He said, ‘No, that’s not necessary.’ ”

Left out in the cold, of course, is Peters, who will not even go to Seoul, a position that Karolyi was insisting on as recently as Sunday. So that power struggle is over.

But will this work? Jacki pointed out that many of the athletes at the trials, working under their individual coaches, performed career bests.

Karolyi, who sees the simple justice of being on hand because he produced three or more of the gymnasts who will be there, said: “Of course, it’s possible. The Russians, Romanians, all my life they be doing it that way, and it always been working.”

The USGF is prepared to shuttle all four main coaches onto the floor, rotating credentials perhaps as their athletes participate. Yet as Karolyi is dominant with his representation, there could be more arguing about floor time.

There is also the question of which coach sets the lineups, the most important thing a coach does during Olympic competition. Because scores rise on each event--the judges like to leave themselves room for a 10--it is open to some artful maneuvering.

A team score can benefit, for example, by putting a high-scoring gymnast up first in an event. The following athletes then tend to be scored higher than they would otherwise.

Similarly, as happened in 1984 with Mary Lou Retton when she was in contention for the all-around title, a gymnast’s individual score can benefit if she goes later, even in an event in which she is comparatively weak.

Jacki said that decision will be handled by a committee, probably the four coaches, two Olympic judges and technical director Jackie Fie. A committee, of course, is where this all started back in January.