![]() The young Strug, who at 1.4m cut a diminutive figure even among her fellow gymnasts, enjoyed a Barcelona Olympics that was at once a success and a disappointment. At 14 years of age, she was the youngest Olympian on the USA team, having qualified just a month before the Games.Īt the Olympic trials, Strug fell during the floor exercise routine, but even though she had convinced herself that she had ruined her chances of qualifying, the Arizona-born gymnast was named the fourth member of the six-person team. If anyone was misled, it was Kerri Strug.Kerri Strug's first taste of the Olympics came at Barcelona 1992. John Tesh misled some of us, Oklahoma, but Kerri Strug didn't. The national perception, this time, is more accurate than the Oklahoma perception. In end-of-year magazine perspectives she is seventh on Time's list of Sports Phenoms of '96 fourth in Newsweek's nationwide poll to pick the top sports newsmakers of '96 sixth on the ESPN Sports Center's top moments of '96 and 13th on The National Sports Review's list of the top 100 newsmakers in '96. Strug finished second in The Associated Press' Female Athlete of the Year voting. "By any measure," the story said, "Kerri Strug's vault to ensure the team gold medal in gymnastics will be remembered as one of the greatest moments in Olympic history." This is a very rare instance in which the national perception - that Strug was an Olympic star - is more accurate than the Oklahoma perception - that Strug was an Olympic fraud.Ī few weeks ago, Oklahoman sports staffers were given an Editor & Publisher article on covering women's sports. had already sewn up the win even without Strug's heroic (second) effort is a minor detail," wrote the 1996 National Sports Review. "I knew if I didn't make it, we wouldn't win the gold," she told People. She was eliminated from subsequent individual competition.Īsk not what your team can do for you ask what you can do for your team. She injured her left ankle on her first vault, then sprained the ankle more severely on her second vault. Point is, Strug put her team ahead of herself. ![]() "She had no way to know that," wrote USA Today. "Strug couldn't have known," wrote People magazine. "We had no idea what the score was," co-head coach Mary Lee Tracy told Time magazine. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklasz. "A 9.9 score on the floor, combined with a low mark by Strug on the second vault, may have enabled the Russians to slip in for the gold," wrote St. And no one could have known, because the eventual-runner-up Russians were still performing their final event, the floor exercise. Strug's score on her first vault would've clinched the gold. had to have another vault from an injured Strug to win the gold. Tesh told us, on NBC's taped report of the gymnastics finals, that the U.S. Or maybe it's because of NBC fawncaster John Tesh, who spent the Olympics hyperventilating in hyperbole about Kerri. Maybe they don't like Kerri because she got more pub than our lady of gymnastics, Shannon Miller. Seems to me, they regard her as a whiner and a fraud. It seems to me that Oklahomans, for whatever reasons, don't like Kerri much. Olympic gymnast whose Leap of Faith vault helped the U.S. You remember Kerri Strug, the injured U.S. We need to fix Oklahoma's opinion of Kerri Strug. We need to fix something about 1996 first.
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