U.S. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL : LOS ANGELES--1991 : Caught Up in the Moment : Festival Director Elizabeth Primrose-Smith Missed an Olympic Opportunity as an Athlete by a Split Second, So She Serves in Another Way

Elizabeth Primrose-Smith might have ended up executive director of the U.S. Olympic Festival regardless, given an inner drive that left competitors in her wake as far back as kindergarten.

It’s arguable whether two-tenths of one second in anyone’s life--a snap of the fingers--could alter the course of a career, yet Primose-Smith cannot dismiss the possibility.

She was a hot-shot high school swimmer out of Baltimore in 1963, a member of a gold-medal winning 4x100-meter freestyle relay team at the Pan American Games in Sao Paulo, Brazil. At 16, she made the Olympic trials in the 100-meter backstroke and was a favorite to advance to Tokyo and the 1964 Olympic Games.

Twenty-seven years later, Primrose-Smith remembers almost every detail. The trials were held in New York to coincide with the World’s Fair.

The venue was terrible, she said. So was the pool. A day before the finals, the elevator broke in her hotel.

“I had to walk down 12 flights of stairs,” she said. “I got a cramp in one of my calves. It never came out. It set my timing off just enough. I was first out of the turn, but I hit on the wrong arm, because my timing was just a little off. My turn was slower, and I was next to last coming out of the turn. That was it.”

Primose-Smith failed to qualify for the Olympics by two-tenths of a second.

“And that was with a stopwatch, remember,” she said, “not one of those electric timers. So someone (the official timekeeper) could have had a very fat (i.e., slow) thumb. Who knows?”

Primrose-Smith, an admitted perfectionist and organizer who spent countless hours in the pool to shave milliseconds from her swim times, would forever attempt to account for that missing fraction of a moment.

“For years I dreamed about it,” she said. “I was devastated by it. I would have gone to Tokyo in the fall, so I had done the first months of schoolwork in the summer just in case I made the team. When I didn’t make the team, everyone didn’t know what to say to me. I disappointed them. God, it was terrible.”

Every night, Primrose-Smith relived the nightmare. Even today, the memory is vivid.

“In retrospect, OK, I shouldn’t have walked down the stairs,” she said. “But the elevator was out.

“And I was so afraid to have a massage from a professional masseur, because I had never had one before, and you don’t fool around with an athlete’s muscles if you don’t know. It was just one of those things. It was why, why, why? But you’re 16, and you’re trying to evaluate. How much experience do you have?”

Primrose-Smith didn’t quit swimming after her defeat, but she admitted her heart wasn’t in the sport soon after. There were no collegiate swimming scholarships for women then, so her career essentially was finished. She directed her competitive energies to schoolwork and graduated second in her high school class, behind a future presidential scholar. She received her undergraduate degree at Stanford and later earned a master’s in business administration at UCLA.

Still, the Olympic flame within her both flickered and taunted.

From her 20th floor downtown office, Primrose-Smith, 43, sits atop the Festival and conducts, like a maestro, the events of her own L.A. Story, one she hopes won’t be marred by the panorama of smog in her present backdrop, or the unjust but inevitable comparisons to the near-flawless spectacle of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

The U.S Olympic Festival is a three-legged sack race in comparison, except that the games will be played in the same city, at many of the same venues, with the same, inspiring, percussion-and-brass John Williams’ Olympic theme song pervading throughout.

But the Festival is Primose-Smith’s baby, for which she is responsible for decision-making as diverse as cultivating corporate sponsorship to the last-minute scramble for new table tennis shirts. (The originals were white, which would make for unsuitable camouflage for the white ping-pong balls.)

“Sitting on top of it all is a challenge,” she said. “It’s exhilarating and sometimes very frustrating

trying to get certain entities to work together. It can be extremely exhausting.”

It was a long road back to the top, the 20th floor. The Olympic spirit never left her, even after the disappointment of 1964. She did well for herself out of college, working for the Stanford Research Institute, the 1981 World Games and the First Interstate Bank Athletic Foundation.

When Peter Ueberroth called in 1981 with an offer

to make her associate vice president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, Primrose-Smith saw an opportunity to, at least in part, fill the void of 1964.

“It didn’t take long for me to disrupt my life and come down,” she said. “I wanted to be a part of it, not only because I wasn’t there before as an athlete, but also

because I remember how inspiring it was for me as an athlete, how it really was an important thing.”

Primrose-Smith can’t say her failed Olympic pursuit motivated her to greater successes out of the pool, but it may have subconsciously led her back on the Olympic trail.

“My urge to achieve predates that,” she said.

Her father was a history professor and coach in Baltimore, her mother a teacher. Recently,

her mother showed Primrose-Smith an evaluation from her kindergarten teacher.

“It said I always had to be the first down the hill,” she said, “the first up the hill, the first to raise my hand. I had this drive to win. I had to be the best. That’s when I was 5, when I didn’t even know what the Olympics was.”

Her Olympic experience in 1984

rekindled athletic memories, stirred emotions, established valuable contacts and ultimately landed her, on Aug. 1, 1989, the job of running the U.S. Olympic Festival in Los Angeles.

She arrived six months late after replacing Earl Duryea, who was fired. Her assignment was not enviable: to stage an Olympic-clone event with limited funds in a fickle, sprawling, entertainment-soaked, smog-choked metropolis that experienced the real Olympics only seven years earlier.

This wasn’t Oklahoma City, a one-time Festival site, where the patrons poured in from the outskirts to get a sense of Olympic competition.

Primrose-Smith would be responsible for coordinating a 10-day event involving 3,000 U.S. amateur athletes in 36 sports.

She would be expected to establish an Olympic “spirit” of competition without pretending it was at all comparable to the spectacle of 1984.

“The budget in 1984 was half a billion dollars,” she said. “Our budget is $15 million. We are not seeking to replicate the ’84 Olympics. We are trying to reignite the Olympic support and fever.”

As the first woman and former athlete named executive director of a U.S. Olympic Festival, Primrose-Smith thinks she adds a different perspective.

“I think it’s significant that I was an athlete more than I’m a woman,” she said. “Having been an athlete and competed on the international level, I think it really gives me insight into what it means for the athlete who is trying to make the Olympics. That’s the only reason we’re here--for the athletes.”

Primrose said her training as a swimmer has helped her cope with the long hours and the meticulous chore of coordinating an event of such diversity and magnitude.

“What I’ve had to learn is pacing, and I do think that has to do with my training,” she said. “Being an athlete, you always have a goal--a certain time you need to meet, a certain Olympic trial or a gold medal. You learn to put up with disappointments and losses along the way. You’ve got to pace yourself.”

Organization is her strength. Primrose-Smith said she learned the technique in high school when she was trying to balance her swimming career with the demands of an all-girls’ prep school.

“If you didn’t organize it well, you just became a mess,” she said. “I learned to compartmentalize things and methodically approach them. That’s really helped me here.”

Her goals for the Festival are modest. Success here means breaking even financially, which hinges on ticket sales. The goal is an attendance of 500,000.

“Ticket sales are the key factor at this point,” she said, 10 days before the opening ceremony. “Will the public come out and support this? It all has to translate into ticket sales. I don’t know how the public’s going to react.”

In a few weeks, the games over, Primrose-Smith will close down shop and move on to something else.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do after this,” she acknowledged.

It is the transient nature of Olympic events.

She explains: “My job is to plan, manage, implement the Olympic Festival from nothing to something to nothing again. I have to disband this whole place. I came here and there was nothing. I had to find office space, furniture, hire staff, train staff, work with the Olympic committees. Then it disappears and all of us look for work.”

Along the way, somewhere between the tension and Taekwondo, there will be a few more cherished memories, some life experiences, perhaps another chance to relive, vicariously, the missing moments denied because of one split second.

Primrose-Smith: “The opening ceremonies? Oh, I’m sure that will bring tears to my eyes. And that music (the John Williams theme), that still brings goose bumps. I’m really a sucker for this.”