Flip-Flop of Gymnastics : U.S. Olympian Garrison-Steves, 21, Is a Woman Competing in a Girls’ World

Kelly Garrison-Steves is that rarest of things in women’s gymnastics. She’s a woman. On an Olympic team where three of the gymnasts are 15 and two others are 17, Garrison-Steves reigns as a kind of Grandma Moses. She’s 21, a college junior and married.

At that alone, she’s quite a curiousity. After failing in two previous Olympic trials she probably should have been given an oldtimer’s exemption for this one. She could chaperon. Yet--and this goes against everything we’ve been led to believe about the sport--she’s gotten better as she’s gotten older. And she now reigns as this country’s second ranking gymnast as well.

Hers is a strange career, unlike that of the other superstars who have been groomed as the next Mary Lou Retton--always the next Mary Lou Retton--rushed through the smallest opportunity of greatness and then, unless that window was the Olympics (that was Retton’s great luck), forgotten.

Anybody remember Kristie Phillips? A year ago people were saying we’ll never see her likes again, when what happened was, we never saw her again.

“It’s a throwaway society,” says Becky Buwick, Garrison-Steve’s coach at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s a shame these girls are such Kleenex to him.”

That is a specific reference to Bela Karolyi, who has coached the three 15-year-olds to this Olympic team, and seemingly abandoned a few others in his driven program. But it refers to so-called women’s gymnastics in general, where youth, and where it falls in a given Olympiad, is judged the strictest standard of qualification.

Mike Jacki, the executive director of the United States Gymnastics Federation, got a laugh at the Olympic trials last month when he told of the coach who gushed he had the perfect candidate for the 1992 Olympics. Supple, dynamic, creative. How old is she, Jackie wanted to know. “That’s the best part,” the coach said. “She’s just 11.” A big laugh, except Jacki wasn’t joking.

Given this thinking, that women’s gymnastics is all timing, you would have assumed that a young Kelly Garrison would have had her shot at the 1980 trials (she did) either made the team or not (not) and gotten out (wrong). Then long past her prime at 17, she braved the 1984 trials. This is really pushing it. Although a favorite to make the team, she broke down on key routines and washed out of those trials. Her next chance would be four years hence; her window of opportunity, it was clear to everyone who knew gymnastics, had just slammed shut.

This was more clear than ever by 1986 when, coming back after an injury and what her coach calls a period of “de-training,” she endured a horrible meet in an Olympic Festival event at Houston. Some people, if they’re lucky, have a shot to make an Olympic team. Kelly Garrison-Steves had had two. “I had a little talk with her,” Buwick said. “We sat down and I said we now have to make a decision. Are we going for the Games or not?”

The decision was yes. “I had planned to make the (1984) team and then retire,” Garrison-Steves said. “But in not making the team, I didn’t really achieve my goal. It was hard to continue, and 1988 seemed forever. But we decided to take it one year at a time.”

When Garrison-Steves enrolled at Oklahoma, she met and married Mark (a former Sooner gymnast), studied public relations, and appeared to be moving on to the real world. The casual observer may well have thought her year was up. College gymnastics, for women, has been a kind of pasture for the elite gymnast. If, unlike Retton, a gymnast failed to turn her Olympic experience into a red Corvette, she could at least wrangle a free education out of it. The history of the sport is that the gymnast retires to National Collegiate Athletic Assn. competition, where the players are (relatively) fat and lazy.

Well, that may not be true anymore. In fact, if Garrison-Steves turns out to be an example, the reverse may be true. “Girls have been peaking at 16,” Buwick said. “The trend is changing, now, though. Even the Soviets are (competing) at 18-19. I don’t think it will be a huge trend. But we realize from an artistic point of view that (older gymnasts) have so much to offer.”

The NCAA program may keep more in the sport, as it does the men. And, like the men, the women may be better for it. “For Kelly, I think the (NCAA) situation helped her become much more consistent. We have 15 meets a season, the girls have three or four. The repetition, just the consistency in coaching. It works and you’re going to see some international gymnasts continue.”

Garrison-Steves won the NCAA all-around both her sophomore and junior seasons but this has had zero impact on the gymnastics community. She was getting better, no question. “The NCAA really helped me,” she said. “And I kept up with the sport, the increasing level of difficulty. Now, I’m much, much better.” But nobody really knew that. Kristie Phillips, at 14, was the one being put on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

But it has turned out that maturity was worth more than youth, after all. That is, if you can survive youth. Garrison-Steves and Buwick had made their share of gaffes along the way, and done, in Buwick’s words, “some very bizarre things.”

“It was the young coach and the rookie syndrome,” Buwick said. “We were very much rookies and adopted practices that are bizarre. I’d pick her up to train at 5 a.m. and then drop her off at school at 8:30. Then we’d train from 2:30 to 9. No wonder she burned out after the (1980) trials. We were exhausted. That was a real stupid thing, an error. No human being can sustain that. But nobody in the country knew much about up-time and down-time in those days. The kind of information that is available to new coaches today, just wasn’t then.”

They survived that, but there were still youthful mistakes to be made. Kelly’s time was to be 1984. She should have, on the basis of prior meets, come out of the trials in third or fourth position. But she straddled the beam, supposedly her best event, and flew off the uneven bars.

“I take full blame for that,” Buwick said. “We should have waited for the Games to try the hot stuff but I had her put two elements in that were kind of risky. Under the pressure, she missed them. I couldn’t believe it. She was fifth going into the last event.”

As the two have gotten older, their relationship has changed so that Buwick no longer dominates as the coach. “Now she sets her own program,” Buwick said. “It’s different from Karolyi, who is totally in charge, very much the coach. But Kelly has become a whole person. When she leaves the sport, she’s not going to exit it physically, mentally or socially deficient.”

And when will she exit the sport? Well, these Olympics are what 14 years of training are all about. “This makes it all worthwhile,” she said.

That she made the team, though, may mean more to other gymnasts than it does even her. “I hope I can be inspirational,” she said. “A lot of girls, they get past 16, it’s over. But, yes, it’s possible. I’ve surprised a lot of people when I proved it wasn’t over. I didn’t want it to be over.”

Her determination, which didn’t receive widespread encouragement, may be a more wonderful thing than even her routines in Seoul. “It’s surprising what you’ll do out of love for the sport,” she said. “Making the team made it all worthwhile, but even if I hadn’t made it, those 14 years were a great experience, something I’ll have forever. You know, I never took anything for granted because I always knew I could never replace the moment.”

The 15-year-old girls never say things like that. Nor do they cry when they make the team, at least not for the reasons Garrison-Steves and Buwick did. “After the trials, when everybody saw us crying they laughed at us,” Buwick said. “But we weren’t crying because we made it, we were thinking about all the kids that didn’t.”

The sad part is that most of the kids who didn’t will never try again. So far in women’s gymnastics, there has only been one of those.