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Cathy Rigby, 19, the delicate (4 ft. 11 in., 90 Ibs.) American hope from Long Beach, Calif., did not fare as well. In the team event on the balance beam she deliberately omitted one leap so as not to endanger her team's point standings by attempting a risky maneuver. The sacrifice was in vain. It left Cathy tied for sixth place (she finished a mediocre tenth in the women's all-round individual). As it turned out, the generous gesture could not have helped the team, which finished in fourth place. That showing, the best for U.S. women since 1948, was somewhat tarnished by the complaint of Cathy's personal coach, Bud Marquette, that Eastern-bloc judges consistently gave American competitors unfairly low scores.
While Marquette's bristling charge (made on worldwide television) seemed to be a windy exercise in bad form, it may not have been without content. All week the officiating in the judgment events was a matter of boiling controversy. None was more violent than the fuss stirred up by the judges who declared a bloodied, badly mauled Soviet fighter, Valery Tregubov, the winner over the U.S.'s clearly superior Reginald Jones in a light-middleweight boxing bout (see box, page 66).
Otherwise, U.S. boxers were having remarkable success. Under the tutelage of Coach Bobby Lewis, the Americans brought to Munich the toughest boxing lineup since a young middleweight named Floyd Patterson headed the 1952 team in the Helsinki Games. As a result, U.S. fighters won ten of eleven bouts in the opening round of competition. Perhaps the most savage of these contests was a technical knockout registered by Bantamweight Ricardo Carreras of the Air Force over Australia's heavily favored Michael O'Brien. The well-matched pair whacked the daylights out of each other in the first two rounds of the three-round match. In the final round, Carreras, stronger and slightly faster than his rugged opponent, landed a thundering left hook to O'Brien's midsection that dropped the Irish-born metalworker to the canvas like a hot ingot.
Dogged. The U.S. was also scoring well in wrestling, a sport usually dominated by Eastern European athletes. In a major upset, Ben Peterson, 22, from Comstock, Wis., won a gold medal in the light-heavyweight class by pinning Bulgaria's Roussi Petrov, thus moving ahead (on points) of his most dogged competitor, Gennadi Strakhov of the Soviet Union. The same day, Peterson's brother John picked up a silver medal in the middleweight class. Because of another questionable judges' decision in the opening round, the American "Monster Man," 434-lb. Chris Taylor, finished with only a bronze. But two more gold medals were won by Lightweight Dan Gable, 23, and Welterweight Wayne Wells, 27, a lawyer from Norman, Okla.