PAN AMERICAN GAMES : At 18, Miller Is Role Model for Kids

When she shot up to 5 feet, weighing 94 pounds, she was too large. When she celebrated her 18th birthday last week, she was too old. In women’s gymnastics, Shannon Miller is guilty of the unpardonable: She has started to become a woman.

While her coach, Steve Nunno, once spoke of future world championships and Olympic gold medals, he now emphasizes her contribution to the strong and suddenly deep U.S. team and her role as a model for young gymnasts who might not believe there is life in the sport after 16.

Walking that fine line between recognizing reality and motivating her to continue working to overcome it, Nunno quickly adds that anything is possible because Miller has never admitted otherwise.

“She could win in Atlanta,” he says, referring to the women’s all-around title in the 1996 Olympic Games. “It hasn’t been done in recent years by someone her age. But Shannon Miller is an incredible athlete. She’s broken records her whole life.”

As a 4-foot-7, 70-pound 15-year-old in 1992, she won five medals, including the silver in the all-around competition, at the Olympics in Barcelona. She since has become only the fourth woman gymnast to win consecutive world all-around titles, adding those to the three other gold medals she has won in world championship competition. No other U.S. gymnast, man or woman, has achieved so much.

But there are signs that she is beginning to let go of her grip on the sport, a situation that cannot be corrected with more chalk on her hands.

After winning every all-around competition she entered for more than two years, Miller finished second last summer in the Goodwill Games at St. Petersburg, Russia. She came home to another second place in the national championships at Nashville, Tenn., then finished second in each of the individual disciplines as Dominique Dawes swept the medals. Two weeks ago, in the American Cup at Seattle, Miller stumbled from the balance beam for the first time in four years and failed to qualify for the final night.

The beam here during the Pan American Games this week has also, as Nunno not-so-delicately puts it, “bitten her in the butt.” The reigning world champion in that discipline, she did not even advance to tonight’s final after falling during her dismount in Sunday’s team optionals. Tuesday night, in the all-around competition, her difficulty came on the mount, almost costing her the championship that she was heavily favored to win. She won by only twelve-hundredths of a point over teammate Amanda Borden. Another American, Amy Chow, was third.

“Right now, I feel great to win,” Miller says. “But I know that I have a lot of work to do. I didn’t have my best competition tonight.”

Miller, almost always polite and cheerful during interviews, bristles a bit when asked the inevitable question about her age.

“It bothers me a little bit that everyone feels it’s so important,” she says. “I’m not even the oldest gymnast here. I might be a little old for the sport, older than what people are used to. But I don’t think that’s going to have any effect on me between now and Atlanta. I’m putting more difficulty into my routines, which I can do because I have more power than I did in 1992. I’m still learning.”

She adds that she has more enthusiasm for the sport than she did in 1993, when she considered quitting after a sudden growth spurt left her with a painful back.

“I had won my first world championship and I had to ask myself, ‘What else is there left for me to do?’ ” she said. “But I sat down with Steve and worked out some new goals, and that helped me a lot. I’m always having to set new goals for myself.”

For this year, her goals are to reclaim the national championship and win her third consecutive world all-around title, then begin preparing for Atlanta. But she also is looking forward to graduating from high school in May.

“Shannon might not be the best all-around gymnast in the world,” Nunno says. “Even the U.S. team is so strong that it’s anybody’s game. She understands other kids are coming up and challenging her. But that’s OK.

“After she lost in Nashville, I looked at the obituary page and showed her that her name wasn’t there. I said, ‘Do you feel any different about gymnastics now?’ She said no, that she still loves it. She’s a fighter.”