Gallagher’s Bronze in the 800 Is Worth Its Weight in Gold

Sometimes it matters not a bit who finishes first and who just plain finishes. Kim Gallagher was not the winner of her Olympic race here Monday, but you would never know it to look at her. She was a bronze medalist, but she seemed as happy as somebody who was going to Disneyland.

In single file, Gallagher, 24, who lives in El Segundo and trains in Santa Monica with the Los Angeles Track Club, had to follow a couple of stoic East Germans into the Olympic Stadium for the awards ceremony after the women’s 800-meter run, just as she had shadowed them to the finish line of the race itself.

The runners from the German Democratic Republic, gold medalist Sigrun Wodars and runner-up Christine Wachtel, were as grim and lock-jawed as though they were being forced to attend some depressing and miserable event, such as, oh, a Seattle-Texas baseball game.

Gallagher, on the other hand, the instant she strolled into the stadium, started waving to the crowd with both hands, “beaming from ear to ear,” as she herself later described it, and was ready to grab an American flag and take a lap, if nobody would mind.

Not really. Gallagher is an upbeat person under most any circumstance, but not that upbeat. The truth of the matter is, she was disappointed not to take the gold or silver. In her heart, however, she understood the magnitude of what she had overcome and accomplished, accepted it for what it was, and rejoiced in the fact that it took two of the world’s best middle-distance runners to beat her. Wodars’ winning time was 1:56.10 seconds.

Pumping her fist in the air triumphantly, Gallagher discovered that her third-place time, 1:56.91, was a measly one one-hundredth of a second slower than Mary Decker Slaney’s American record.

“I didn’t know that,” she said, stepping off the track. “Darn it!”

Oh, well. No big deal. What meant most to Gallagher was the medal and the effort, and she also was quite aware that, with Slaney nursing an injured calf, it may be that Gallagher and Regina Jacobs have to carry the United States in the 1,500 meters, later in the Games.

“This was just the beginning for me,” Gallagher said. “I think I have the speed to kick with the best runners in the 1,500. I’m looking forward to that event even more than I did the 800. The 15 is my main focus here. I’m going to go home tonight, regroup and act as if I haven’t even won a medal here yet. I’m going to go into the 15 with a strong head.”

What gives Gallagher this sort of optimism, aside from her naturally bubbly personality, is the knowledge of what she already has dealt with in her track career, just to get this far.

The silver medal she won in Los Angeles, at the 1984 Olympics, for that matter, was quite an accomplishment, considering that 6 months before the ’84 U.S. trials, she had undergone surgery for polycystic ovaries. And yet, the asterisk that remained next to that 1984 result, because of the Eastern Bloc boycott, was a constant reminder that, well, it was an Olympic medal, but not an Olympic medal.

“Everyone was saying that, because the strongest countries weren’t there, that my silver medal wasn’t really a silver medal,” Gallagher recalled. “That’s why this bronze means more to me than that one. I had the two best 800 women in the world in front of me, and I was picked ninth going into this race. That’s where I read that I was going to finish.

“I am so happy. I wanted the gold, but I have absolutely nothing to complain about. I am extremely pleased with myself.”

She ought to be. It was just 3 years ago, at a meet in Modesto, that Gallagher suffered a relapse from her physical difficulties and doubled over in agony, saying later, “I felt like I was being stabbed in the stomach.” For a year, the pains persisted. She feared for her running career as well as her health.

There had been some other wasted time. She could have been out running, in 1983, when instead she spent a year at the University of Arizona doing more partying than practicing. Her older brother, Bart, coached her for a time, and then she joined Chuck DeBus and his L.A. Track Club, and started to take off.

Like another runner from the Los Angeles area you may have heard of, Florence Griffith Joyner, Gallagher competes with a flair. Her fingernails might not be as long as Flo-Jo’s 3-inch thumbnail, but they are close. It is fast becoming the trademark of these American women. Gallagher wore bright red polish on 5 of her 10 nails--the thumb and ring finger of her left hand, the 1-3-4 fingers of her right hand.

After the U.S. trials at Indianapolis, Gallagher took 4 weeks and went to Davos, Switzerland, to train at high altitude, then 2 more weeks in Colorado Springs, Colo., for the same purpose.

She was ready to make a run at the East Germans, who had gone 1-2 at the 1987 World Championships at Rome. But Wodars and Wachtel work together when they race, plotting their tactics, and they were as ready for Gallagher as she was for them.

Going around the final turn of the final lap, they had her pinned. Gallagher was in fifth place, looking for an opening.

“I wanted the gold, and as I was running, I was thinking, ‘I can still get it. I can still get it.’ But I had to go wide around them, because I got boxed in. It wasn’t the race I wanted to run, but just to come out of it with a bronze, I’m happy.

“That’s why I acted the way I did on the way to the awards stand, beaming from ear to ear like that. I just couldn’t stop grinning and crying, crying and grinning. The emotions were coming at me from every direction. The kind of feeling it is, there just aren’t words to describe it.”

Sure, there are:

Good as gold.