Not Only Her Style Is Different : Okino’s Movements Have Flow of a Ballerina, but Her Family’s Trip to the United States Was Anything but Smooth

It was midnight when Israeli commandos opened fire at Entebbe. Aurelia Okino threw her children under her bed for protection. Betty Okino was only a year old then.

The gunfire was so loud and the Okinos’ house so close that shots rattled the windows and struck the roof. Francis and Aurelia Okino and their children lived less than a mile from the airport where Palestinian terrorists and the army of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin had held more than 100 passengers of a hijacked airliner--most of them Israelis--for more than a week.

The gunfire lasted about three hours, and when it stopped, all but three hostages--those who had died during the battle--were freed. But the Okinos, who for a time had mistakenly thought the battle meant the overthrow of Amin, remained prisoners of Francis’ native Uganda. They continued to make plans to flee the country before Amin could kill them, as he had many of their friends.

Their long journey would one day land them in the United States, where Betty, 15, is one of the most promising gymnasts since Mary Lou Retton.

But all that the Okinos knew then was that they had no future in Entebbe. Amin, a Muslim who grew up in the Northern region of Uganda, persecuted Northerners and Catholics--and Francis was both. Amin also hated whites, which included Aurelia, who is Romanian. The Okinos heard that Amin’s troops were picking up Northerners by the truckloads and hauling them to the rapids of the Nile River, where they were drowned.

It was 1976, and Amin had been in power since ’71. The Okinos thought it was only a matter of time before the dictator or his army targeted them for death.

Three months after the raid on Entebbe, Francis Okino received a grant from the World Health Organization, where he worked as a veterinarian, to study for his master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. Aurelia took Betty and son Eddy home to stay with her mother in Romania.

The Okinos learned later that three weeks after they left Entebbe, Amin’s army thought the family was still in the house hiding and broke in through the roof with orders to kill them.

In Romania, Aurelia Okino had other problems. The Communist government of Nicolae Ceausescu, which had allowed her to marry Francis, now considered her a foreigner and wouldn’t let her stay in the country without paying $20 a day. She had only $200--the maximum allowed when she left Uganda.

Aurelia, who had grown up under Communism, thought that if she took her son and daughter to Minnesota to join her husband, the children would surely die. She had been taught in Romania that America was an awful place, where people killed and stole, and children could not survive the evils there.

Francis had already received his American welcome. When he arrived in New York from Uganda, a taxi driver took him on a $70 scenic route. When Francis didn’t have enough money for the fare, the cabbie took what cash Francis had and left him off in the middle of a street.

Aurelia decided to leave the children with her mother in Romania and join Francis in Minnesota.

It wasn’t long before the Okinos felt differently about the United States. Aurelia worked and saved enough money to return to Romania and pick up Betty, by then 2 1/2, and Eddy, 4 1/2. However, Betty didn’t know who Aurelia was. She was afraid of this woman who called herself “Mother.”

“I would stare in Betty’s eyes for hours hoping that she might find me again,” Aurelia said. “Finally, Betty connected with me. And I wanted never to be away from her again.”

From a Chicago suburb, twice every day, Aurelia Okino telephones Betty in Houston, where the gymnastics star lives with her grandmother and attends Bela Karolyi’s camp. Then, Aurelia calls Francis, who lives in Springfield, where he is a chief veterinarian with the Illinois Bureau of Inspection.

“I didn’t want her to go to Houston, but she had to in order to advance in gymnastics the way we knew she could,” Aurelia said recently from her home in Elmhurst, Ill. “We moved to Elmhurst to be closer to a gym for Betty to train, but shortly after that, Francis got promoted to a job in Springfield, and I have a good job in the computer industry. So I am here, he is there and she is in Houston.”

Aurelia wanted her daughter to be a dancer. From the time Betty was 4, she took ballet, jazz and tap. At 6, Betty was winning national dance contests and performing at governor’s functions and the State Fair. At 8 1/2, scouts from New York ballet companies wanted her to move there and continue her dance studies.

“It was right after the 1984 Olympics, and Betty didn’t want to be a dancer, she wanted to be a gymnast,” Aurelia said. “Where we lived at the time in Illinois, there was no gymnastics school. We wanted her to go to Bela’s school, but it was too full and she couldn’t even get a tryout. So I went around to coaches and asked them questions and would come home and teach Betty myself.”

After 1 1/2 years, Betty was competing at the Class 1 gymnastics level and had advanced beyond Aurelia’s ability to teach. The family moved to Elmhurst, and Betty joined a gymnastics club. She quit competing as a dancer but continued to go to Chicago twice a week for ballet lessons.

In 1989, Betty failed to make the U.S. junior national team. She wrote to former U.S. gymnastics star Phoebe Mills for advice, and Mills told her to go to Karolyi’s gym. The Okinos borrowed $20,000, and in November of 1989, Betty, whom Karolyi had never heard of, became one of his students.

“At first, Betty just took a modest place in the group, never excelling at anything, just taking her turn, “ Karolyi said from Houston. “But she had unusually rapid improvement. She went from not even making the junior team to placing second last year on the national senior team (in the U.S. Championships).

“I think the difference is in her attitude. She doesn’t have ups or downs, doesn’t get too excited, is never moody. She is smooth and consistent and not dramatic. Other girls, I have a hard time keeping them moving forward, because they are upset or moody. But Betty, I never have to do that. She just keeps moving on.”

Betty Okino is so good at her sport and so different in her style that even Ellen Berger, the East German judge who helped cost the U.S. women a bronze medal in the 1988 Olympic Games, said she is “the most beautiful gymnast (I have) seen in a long time.” Berger wasn’t commenting on Okino’s looks or her demeanor, but she could have been.

After a competition in Germany last November Berger approached her longtime foe, Karolyi, and congratulated him on his new student. Berger was among many judges who applauded Okino during her first competitions in Europe, where her cool and elegant style stirred memories of the classic Soviet women gymnasts of the early 1970s.

“Before Mary Lou (Retton), way before Mary Lou, gymnasts were taller and leaner, like Betty is,” Karolyi said. “But gymnasts became smaller and spunkier, forgetting amplitude, which was part of the specific Soviet style.

“Betty brought back old memories to the judges, who were applauding her flowing, beautiful style and not just spectacular, powerful movements.”

At 5 feet 1 and 98 pounds, Okino appears lanky. She is not likely to get much taller--Aurelia is 5-2.

Big brown eyes and a sweetness offset her intensity while she is performing. Her movements flow, in a style likened more to ballet.

Okino, though she came to this country from Uganda via Romania, is All-American. When she was younger, her mother would videotape the America’s Cup gymnastics meet--a major international competition--and Betty would watch it repeatedly. She used to stand in front of the mirror and practice waving, pretending she was on the winner’s podium.

In February, Okino quit pretending. She not only won the America’s Cup competition with a score of 39.787 points--out of a maximum of 40 points--but she beat Nadia Comaneci’s all-around score of 39.75, a record that had stood for 15 years. Okino had her first perfect score, earning a 10 on the vault. Her worst score in the meet came on the balance beam, where she got a 9.937.

Okino’s performance brought back pleasant memories for Karolyi, who was Comaneci’s coach in Romania when she set the meet record at the America’s Cup in 1976.

The beam is Okino’s specialty, as it was Comaneci’s. Already a beam movement--a triple pirouette--has been named “the Okino.”

Okino’s main rival is U.S. champion Kim Zmeskal, a friend who is also coached by Karolyi. The America’s Cup marked the sixth consecutive time that Okino had beaten Zmeskal, but the difference between them is seemingly a matter of style. Zmeskal’s style--she’s short and the most powerful gymnast on the U.S. women’s team--is more like that of Retton’s. Accordingly, Zmeskal seems to fare better in U.S. competitions, while Okino earns higher marks in international meets.

“(Kim) is not my friend when it comes to competition, she’s just another competitor,” Okino said recently in an interview with USA Gymnastics magazine. “. . .The first time I beat her (at the 1990 Goodwill Games) I couldn’t believe how much I had improved. . . . I knew I wasn’t competitive in the world until I beat Kim.

“Every competition between us has been really close. At any moment, one of us can have a little wobble and the other will win. It’s hard, but it’s also easy in that I know that this is the person I have to beat.”

Okino strained her hamstring in April before a meet against Romania and is not expected to compete in the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Classic next weekend at Marina High in Huntington Beach. That meet will serve as one qualifying event for the U.S. National Championships, which will be held next month in Cincinnati. Okino has already qualified for the nationals because of her second-place finish in last year’s meet, and Karolyi said she will be ready.

Gymnasts who gain berths on the U.S. national team in June will qualify for the 1991 World Championships at Indianapolis in September. After that, the objective will be the 1992 Olympics at Barcelona, Spain.

“Barcelona, it will be Betty,” Karolyi said.