THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 12, 1994 TAG: 9410120571
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TOM ROBINSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GAITHERSBURG, MD. LENGTH: Long : 135 lines
Greatness is under construction in a Gaithersburg industrial park, where the best female gymnast in the land trains.
Thirty hours a week, in a two-story red brick building - essentially a warehouse stuffed with mats and gym apparatus tucked away in the Washington suburbs - 17-year-old Dominique Dawes sharpens the skills she used to stun the gymnastics community last August when she won all five events at the U.S. national championships.
The modest environment, whose door is adorned above with a simple sign that reads ``Applawes for Dawes,'' isn't Bela Karolyi's or any of the other flashy gymnastics factories that smelt intense, world-class athletes out of lithe young girls.
Rather, Dawes is one of Hill's Angels, the first international-caliber gymnast coached by gym owner Kelli Hill, and she likes that status just fine.
It is a comfortable home for Dawes, a 40-minute drive from her family's Silver Spring, Md. house, but home just the same. A home to which Dawes has brought great honor through her sparkling acrobatics, engaging personality and remarkable drive.
``A lot of fans or people around me used to ask when I was going to Karolyi's, because that's the gym that was in and where all the No. 1 people were coming from,'' Dawes said recently as she prepared for this weekend's World Team Trials at the Richmond Coliseum. The top 16 finishers from the national championships in Nashville will compete for seven spots on the U.S. squad that will take part in the World Team Championships in Dortmund, Germany, next month.
``I just thought there'd be no reason to leave really, if I was doing fine at Hill's,'' Dawes said. ``It's where I wanted to be and it's where I grew up. (Karolyi) is a really good coach, I guess, but Kelli's real good, too.''
Together, Hill and Dawes produced a performance in Nashville of incandescent success. Dawes seized five gold medals - taking first place in the all-around competition and then winning the individual balance beam, uneven bars, vault and floor exercise - as two-time defending world champion Shannon Miller finished second in each event.
Such dominance has occurred only once in the United States, in 1969 when Joyce Tanac Schroeder won every event at the AAU Nationals, which then were the national championships.
Name any American female gymnast from any era and Miller and Dawes are better than them, said Breck Greenwood, gymnastics coach at Stanford University, where Dawes has a scholarship waiting for either the fall of 1995 or '96.
``Shannon and Dominique are arguably the best the U.S. has ever had,'' Greenwood said. ``The big stars of the past - these guys have surpassed them.''
Dawes, in fact, the last two years has been a botched vault away from possibly surpassing Miller and making the world title her own.
In England in 1993 and Australia last April, Dawes missed her landing on the same vault. Had she stuck both, Dawes was close enough to Miller, and the vault difficult enough, to surpass her compatriot for the title.
Instead, Dawes, a member of the U.S. team that won the bronze medal in the '92 Olympics, finished fourth in '93 and fifth last spring.
``In '93, going for that vault was a gamble, but we opted to go for the gold,'' said Hill, a former University of Maryland gymnast. ``We knew she didn't have the vault, but she couldn't win without it. Then in '94, she just kept replaying that scenario in her mind. She hadn't missed that vault the entire year till worlds. When we got there, the past came back to haunt her.''
Since Nashville, where she overcame her vault fault, nothing seems to bother Dawes, a 5-foot, 96-pound wisp whose sinewy arms and shoulders render her deceptively robust. Not the expectations of those in gymnastics or outside pressures to perform to a certain preordained level.
She competes to have fun and challenge herself, Dawes said, not solely to beat Miller or the best the world might offer. That attitude helped lift her and keep perspective through the U.S. nationals, she said.
Maintaining control of her destiny, Dawes refuses to divulge her plans for her international career, which is the main reason Stanford has deferred her scholarship.
If Dawes decides to go for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, she'll enter Stanford that fall. But if she decides she's had enough after November's World Team Championships, and she won't discuss anything beyond that, she'll enter college next year.
Hill says Dawes will be in Atlanta. Dawes claims she's undecided.
``I'll have to come to a point and decide, because if I don't I really won't have a goal to be heading towards,'' said Dawes, who graduated from Gaithersburg High School last June with an A average despite training two hours a day before school and five hours after. ``I won't have a goal to come to practice every day.''
Dawes, who moved in with Hill in Gaithersburg two years ago to ease the commuting demands on her family, has cut the morning workout from her schedule since returning to Silver Spring. But she remains at the peak of a career that began at age 6, when she bounced off beds and body-surfed down staircases so much that her parents decided to channel that energy onto a mat.
They deposited her at Hill's first gym, a hole in the wall in Wheaton, Md., and she soon lit up the place. After a couple years, Hill said she pegged Dawes for the '92 Barcelona Olympics.
``When she was about 8 or 9, that was the background goal,'' Hill said. ``We didn't talk about it a lot, but that's what I tracked from. I don't think she believed me till she was probably 13.
``Once a child gets into that competitive track, they either sink or swim. Dom always loved it. I knew she had the talent, it was very obvious. It was up to her whether she wanted to persevere and stay with it.''
Dawes competed in Barcelona with tendinitis in both ankles and finished only 26th in the all-around.
To her father, Don, it was further evidence of just how much Dawes wants to excel.
As his daughter - Dawes has an older sister and younger brother - trained seven hours a day in pain for those Olympics, Don Dawes advised the occasional day off.
``I thought it was kind of bizarre, 'cause it's nothing but a sport,'' Don Dawes said. ``It's no big thing, don't go to practice tomorrow if you're hurting. She'd start crying, saying she wanted to go to practice, hurting. She said she had to do it.''
The fruit of all that practice shows for Dawes in all four gymnastic disciplines, though her forte is a dynamic, crowd-pleasing floor exercise with a powerful start.
Everybody does one tumbling pass across the mat to begin. Dawes, though, goes over and back nonstop in one amazing chain of 10 flips, roundoffs, whip-backs, handsprings and double-somersaults that nobody else, even Miller, has the strength or endurance to execute.
The unique opening was born in Hill's former gym, a cozy room where Dawes began to reverse her field immediately after the first pass to avoid hitting a wall at the end of the mat.
``I can't believe she can do it,'' Stanford's Greenwood said. ``It's unbelievable. There are 10 tricks in that line, and the very last one is a bigger skill than anybody on my team can do, a 2 1/2 twist punch front. That by itself is pretty hard.''
Then again, Dawes, Hill's brightest Angel, is pretty special. ILLUSTRATION: ALLSPORT COLOR PHOTOS
Dominique Dawes, 17, turned the gymnastics world upside down with
her August nationals sweep.
An undersized practice gym aided Dawes' explosive floor exercise.
by CNB