(2 of 3)
The spectacular team victory was the week's unmatchable high point. Because of Strug's injury--a severe ankle sprain--she was forced to withdraw from the individual competition two nights later. Moceanu took her place, joining Miller and Dominique Dawes as America's three entrants. Performing separately, they seemed more fragile, both physically and emotionally. Moceanu wobbled on the balance beam and was never in contention. Dawes and Miller, two stoic 19-year-olds, each made a major flub on the floor exercise and walked off sobbing, aware that their medal chances had vanished. That allowed the elfin Ukrainian Lilia Podkopayeva, the reigning world champion, to edge past three tough Romanians to win the gold.
Team spirit propelled the U.S. men temptingly close to a medal as well. Never as highly regarded as the women, they nonetheless performed better than expected, staying in the medal hunt almost to the end and finishing a respectable fifth. (Russia captured the gold.) In the individual competition, national champion John Roethlisberger pumped up the crowd with his intensity but couldn't match the grace of China's Li Xiaoshuang, who nudged out Russia's Alexei Nemov for the gold.
The men have more work to do; the women can savor the fruits of a building project four years in the making. Though the U.S. women won a bronze medal in Barcelona, the program was plagued by controversy. The coaches were fractious, the girls looked unhappy and undernourished, and criticism began to emerge that the program drove adolescent girls too hard in service of demanding parents and coaches. Much of the criticism was aimed at Karolyi, the former Romanian coach who brought the world Nadia Comaneci and later trained such U.S. stars as Mary Lou Retton and Kim Zmeskal.
One change for '96 was that Karolyi, head coach of the '92 team, was replaced by a duo: his wife Martha and Tracy. They were an effective team--Martha Karolyi the experienced technician, Tracy the supportive den mother. The group they assembled for the Olympics was older and more mature than the '92 group: three were competing in their second Olympics, and the average age was 18. Moceanu, the tiny 14-year-old who got the most advance press hype, was an exception that will soon be against the rules; for the 2000 Games, the minimum age for competition has been changed to 16.
The U.S. squad worked with single-minded determination in pursuit of a team gold. In Atlanta the U.S. gymnasts were housed not in the Olympic Village with the rest of the athletes but in a fraternity house at Emory University along with a small army of coaching technicians, sports psychologists, nutritionists and a chef. On noncompetition days, the girls worked out from 8:30 in the morning until 8:30 at night, returning to the dorm for a lunch break and a dose of their favorite soap, Days of Our Lives. "During the past year there's been some negative press about eating problems and everything like that," says Tracy. "This team is the opposite of that image. There wasn't any abuse here."