Olympic Winners Are Readjusting Sights

If you put several Olympic gold medalists in a room and feed them crabcakes for lunch and cheesecake for desert, they’ll reveal some of their deep, dark secrets.

Roger Kingdom, the two-time 110-meter hurdles champion, will say he wants to be a decathlete. Louise Ritter, the surprising 1988 high-jump winner, will say she will compete in 1992, at age 34, as long as sprinter Evelyn Ashford competes, too. And Ashford, of course, will say she will be running hard at Barcelona.

The trio of Seoul gold medalists said those things this week, here to promote the Mobil 1 Invitational meet, scheduled for Feb. 5 at George Mason University. Veterans all, they would seem to have accomplished enough to call it a career and move on to real life. They almost have it all--and yet they want more.

So Kingdom plans to try the decathlon and Ritter and Ashford, two of the most respected track and field veterans, keep double-daring each other to hang around another four years.

“I’m curious about what I can do the next couple of years,” said Ashford, 31, a three-time gold medalist from 1984 and 1988.

More immediately, what she and the other two will do is compete in the Mobil event, to be televised live by ESPN from 3 until 5 p.m. EST.

Ritter, who upset world champion Stefka Kostadinova of Bulgaria in a dramatic jumpoff in the Olympics, doesn’t often compete in indoor meets. But this season she has had promoters calling, saying they were switching their men’s high-jump competition to women’s so they could get her.

“I don’t think it’s me, Louise Ritter, doing it,” she said. “It’s me, the gold medalist, doing it.”

There is a popular misconception in the United States that all Olympic gold medalists get rich. Few do, and Ritter isn’t among them.

“The phone rings a lot more and I did get a raise in the appearance fees I get in meets, but as far as commercials and big things, there’s been nothing,” said Ritter, 30.

“It’s not like anyone expects. Or maybe I’m just the only gold medalist who is not making a lot of money. Then again, I didn’t go to the Olympics to become a media star. There were many reasons to go, and none were related to money.”

Ashford, the 1984 gold medalist who held the 100-meter world record until Florence Griffith Joyner came along, will run the 60-meter dash at the George Mason meet. In Seoul, she finished second to Griffith Joyner in the 100 and ran the anchor leg on the United States’ gold medal-winning 4x100-meter relay team.

In that race, she saved Griffith Joyner and the rest of the team from the embarrassment of finishing second when, after a miserable exchange with Griffith Joyner, she came from behind to beat East German Marlies Gohr in the final 100 meters.

Ashford said the relay team almost failed to qualify for the final--as the men’s team did later that day--when only three members of the team showed up for a heat. But, 30 minutes before the race, officials tracked down an alternate who had been shopping in Itaewon, and all was well.

Kingdom, 26, has won the 110-meter hurdles in the last two Olympics and doesn’t plan to give up his specialty. But he does want to expand his repertoire. He is talking not about just one new event, but 10. He plans to try his first competitive decathlon at the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle.

“I like to compete,” Kingdom said. “I hate it when I run the hurdles and then, with my adrenaline pumping and being all ready to go, I’m already finished. The decathlon gives me something else to do.”

Kingdom said Andre Phillips, the 1988 400 hurdles gold medalist, and Keith Talley also plan to join him in this unusual endeavor.

One of the reasons they have decided to do this is to vary their training. A second reason is that current U.S. decathletes aren’t very good.

The Mobil 1 60-meter hurdles probably will feature something the Olympics could not: a race between Kingdom, bronze-medalist Tonie Campbell and Greg Foster, the two-time world champion who broke his arm before the U.S. Olympic trials and failed to make the team. Foster has not yet officially said he will come, but he apparently is close to doing so.