Wilmington Man’s Deft Management Kept U.S. Team on Track for Gold

You won’t find Bob Seaman’s performance listed among the more important ones of the 24th Olympiad in Seoul.

But it should be.

Seaman, 53, of Wilmington, was the manager for the U.S. women’s track team. He was in charge of “every non-coaching thing” in Seoul, including transporting athletes, housing them and making sure they got to the track in time.

Seaman found the job a constant challenge.

“Every day we would have what I call a mini-crisis to solve,” he said. “We would take care of it. It was all part of the job.”

The attitudes of some athletes and their personal coaches presented the biggest problems during the month Seaman and his staff spent overseas.

“You have lots of egos to deal with, but you have to learn to slide with the punches,” he said. “Everyone wants to do things their own way, and that can cause problems.”

Like the time two prominent male sprinters marched into the headquarters of the U.S. Olympic Committee and haughtily demanded that they be allowed to leave Korea early, before the rest of the team.

Or the situations he faced handling complaints about room accommodations.

Then there was the time members of a well-known Southern California track club demanded to leave as a group, not with the rest of the Olympic team.

“When you have to deal with personal coaches, it can be a problem,” Seaman said.

Seaman prefers not to name the athletes involved in the incidents. He handled their requests as needed and solved them on the spot.

That was that, he said. Why drag their names through the mud?

“In general, we had very little problems,” he added.

According to Seaman, the 1988 U.S. track team was better behaved than past teams (he was an assistant in Los Angeles in 1984). One reason, he said, was that the average age of the women’s team this year was 26.

“We had six competitors who were mothers with small children,” he said. “They were more mature. You used to have teen-agers on the team. We didn’t have one this year.”

Housing arrangements presented one of the biggest problems in Seoul. Although Seaman is complimentary of the Koreans (“There was no anti-Americanism that I could see”), he found the Olympic Village Spartan. Most disturbing, he said, was the problem of long waiting lines in the cafeteria. The food, he said, was no more than “adequate.”

Many U.S. athletes stayed in a compound some distance from the village. It was specified as family housing. Better-known athletes, such as Florence Griffin Joyner, stayed downtown in high-rise hotels.

Because the team was spread out, Seaman found himself snarled in traffic most of the time.

In one incident, Seaman came to the aid of the U.S. men’s team by picking up discus throwers Mac Wilkins and Mike Buncie from the family compound. En route to the Olympic Stadium his vehicle became entangled in traffic headed in the wrong direction.

“I could see ’72 in Munich all over again,” he said. “Those track athletes who did not get to the stadium on time for their events were disqualified. I could see that happening to me. I thought, ‘Oh, boy, we’re going to have a problem here.’ ”

Thanks to maneuvering, Seaman got the athletes to a field-event checkpoint near the Han River with time to spare.

But traffic wasn’t the only problem the U.S. team faced. Quarter-pound hamburgers were off limits to the squad, too, Seaman said, after several athletes became sick eating in American-style fast-food establishments.

“We posted a sign outside our headquarters listing (places not to eat).”

A miler, Seaman ran track at UCLA in the mid-1950s, He participated in the 1956 Olympic trials, finishing fifth.

It is one of his greatest disappointments. “I thought that would be my only Olympic opportunity,” he said.

He turned in a sub-4-minute mile in 1962, but his Olympic dream did not materialize, so he went to work as a salesman for a wax company. A friend asked him to help coach a girls track team, but Seaman wasn’t interested.

“Women’s track wasn’t big back then, he said. “It hadn’t risen to the prominence it has today.

But “one thing led to another,” according to Seaman, and he found himself being sucked deeper into women’s track, first as a representative with the Amateur Athletic Union and later with the Athletics Congress.

In 1981 he was nominated to the USOC as an assistant track manager for the 1984 Olympic team. He still doesn’t know who placed his name before the USOC.

“I was so excited,” he said. “But I was a little frightened. I did not know what to expect.”

As part of his preparation for the 1984 Olympics, Seaman worked at both the U.S. national championships and the Pan American Games. Less than a year after the L.A. Olympics, he was appointed head women’s track manager.

The Seoul Olympics were “a little easier for me,” he said. “The men and women’s staff blended together well, much better than before.”

There were 17 staff members to look after the athletes in Seoul.

“We can come home holding our heads high,” he said about the women’s track performances. “We won six gold medals. Before it began I thought we’d maybe get three.”

Although she was hounded by the media, Griffith Joyner handled the pressure well, Seaman said. There was an area outside the Olympic stadium where athletes could warm up away from reporters and curiosity seekers. That provided a nice backdrop for competitors to mentally prepare for their events, Seaman said.

Griffith Joyner, says Seaman, was driven to her events by non-team members, then whisked back to her hotel when she was finished. Still, with Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Griffith Joyner, “I have never seen that kind of interest in women’s track before. I have never seen so many magazine covers.”

Seaman says his sport “in general is spreading out. The Kenyans won four gold medals. It’s difficult for any one country to dominate any longer,” Seaman said.

He produced several photographs he shot at the Olympics. In one, Mary Decker Slaney can be seen leading a tight pack of runners into turn 3 of the women’s 3,000-meter run. Slaney, however, did not win a medal. Now her Olympic future is up in the air, much like Seaman’s.

“Track has a tough road to make it now,” Seaman said of the sport’s future. “It has to be marketed. And we must convince athletes to stay in track and not (turn professional) in other sports.”

As for Seaman, the traveling wax salesman, he’s not sure how much longer he can be involved internationally. His term with the USOC expired when the Seoul Games were over. Now he has only the freeways of Southern California to worry about.