She Had Already Gotten Up

As falls go, it wasn’t much. Not in your top 10. A swift tumble, a spill, a desperate effort to maintain balance and finally a crawl. Not even a knee scrape. If it had happened in a parking lot, even the ambulance chasers would have passed it up.

But it didn’t happen in a parking lot. It happened in Lane 2 of the Olympic finals of the 100-meter hurdles. In full view of about a billion spectators, worldwide.

The press the next day treated it as if it had been the fall of France. Of the Roman Empire. Humpty Dumpty.

It’s an athlete’s worst nightmare. The ultimate fear.

There had been great falls in the Olympics before. Jim Ryun toppling in the heats of the 1,500 meters at the Munich Games. Mary Decker Slaney falling over Zola Budd in the ’84 Games.

You would think Gail Devers would have lain there, pounding the ground and weeping hysterically. You work all your life for that moment. You are, perhaps, the greatest women’s hurdler in the world. Your times show it. And now, you’re winging it out there, yards ahead of your competition. The gold medal is merely a formality. You’re on your way to the Olympic and, maybe, world record.

And, then, crash! the unthinkable. You hit the 10th and last hurdle with your lead foot. If you hit it with your trailing foot, it probably doesn’t even slow you down. With your lead foot, it is like hitting a roller skate on the top of the staircase.

So, does Gail Devers hurry off the field in tears? Does she sob her heart out, run away and hide from the world for the next year or so? Go out in public in dark glasses and a head scarf?

Naw. Gail Devers leaps to her feet, takes a quick glance at the scoreboard, sees where the Greek woman has won--and stands there smiling and clapping.

Still, it was a devastating tumble. Cost her a gold medal, a record, endorsements and whatever else goes with winning the Olympic gold, right?

Not exactly. What that fall did was make Gail an instant celebrity. America’s Sweetheart. The World’s Darling.

She had won a gold medal five days before in an event she wasn’t supposed to--the 100-meter sprint. That was nice. Made the A wire. Then languished.

But the fall touched the world. Wherever she went for the next five months, no one mentioned the gold. Crowds did double-takes and then blurted: “Oh, you’re the one who fell over that hurdle. What a tragedy!”

It wasn’t really. It evoked something more precious than admiration--empathy. Everyone who has ever stumbled and taken a header in the big moment of his or her life could understand. It was like Dempsey being a victim of the long count. The best thing that ever happened to him in many ways.

Anyway, Devers knew well what real tragedy was, and it was not tripping over a hurdle. Tragedy was not losing a race, tragedy was losing your feet.

Devers never expected to be in the starting blocks of the Barcelona Olympics in the first place. There was a time when she feared she might be in an orthopedic ward, getting fitted for new feet.

A year before the Olympics, Gail’s greatest ambition was not to be able to run, it was to be able to walk. Even stand. Being able to crawl to the bathroom was a triumph of gold-medal proportions.

Tragedy is being told you have a simple condition of athlete’s foot, when actually you have a life-threatening, incurable illness--Graves’ disease--which can’t be treated with Absorbine Jr.

Look, do you have little reminders stashed around the house, memo pads, strings around fingers, numbers pasted to a bulletin board?

So does Gail Devers. Only hers are not to remind her to pick up some milk at the grocery store or to phone the gas company, hers are a system of alarms to remind her to save her life. Reminders that go off like a four-alarm fire bell at the same time every day. Reminders to take a medication called Synthroid and never forget it because without it, life for Gail is all 10th hurdles.

The thyroid is very important. It regulates the body’s metabolism. Too much secretion and you are hyperactive, restless, your eyes bulge, skin discolors, your heart pounds and you are chronically unable to sit and relax. The world is too slow for you. Too little secretion and you are a lump. Listless, usually in a torpor, given to memory loss, the original couch potato.

But Devers doesn’t even have a thyroid. That’s like not having an ignition. She has to jump-start her day with medication. She has to keep her Graves’ disease in remission.

Gail puts up with all this because she is a woman on a mission. She has some unfinished business to take care of at the ’96 Olympics. She wants to get her hurdles gold medal, to get over that last barrier this time.

In 1948, the great Harrison Dillard was the top high hurdler in the world. He held the record and had been unbeatable all year. But in the Olympic trials, he clipped a barrier and, inexplicably, didn’t make the team. But he did qualify in the sprint.

Like Gail Devers 44 years later, he won the event he wasn’t supposed to win, beating the great Barney Ewell, Lloyd La Beach and world record-holder Mel Patton.

It was not enough for Bones Dillard. He worked and trained for the ’52 Olympics and came back and won the race he had spent his life running, the 110 highs.

Gail Devers wants to do at Atlanta in ’96 what Dillard did at Helsinki in ‘52--get vindication.

To that end, she will be one of the key performers at the 34th annual Sunkist Invitational track meet Feb. 20 at the Sports Arena. She will run the 50-meter dash. It is one in a series of steps she hopes will lead to the victory platform in Georgia three years from now.

“That last hurdle owes me,” she says, laughing.

I’m not so sure it isn’t the other way ‘round.