THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 22, 1996 TAG: 9607220138
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Tom Robinson
from Atlanta
LENGTH: 77 lines
Name a U.S. female gymnast, any U.S. female gymnast. You will not name Kerri Strug first. Nobody will.
You will go with the familiar, the names on the tip of the tongue. Which means you will choose Shannon Miller, with her five Olympic medals, Dominique Dawes, with her ability to dominate on a given day, or wonder-child Dominique Moceanu, with the little girl charm that makes the big people swoon.
Assuming you've even heard of her, Strug, as in shrug, might get your call next. Maybe. Through no fault of her own, the 18-year-old Arizonan has lived her gymnastics life in the era and shadow of brighter personalities and talents.
She is a squeaky-voiced pup from the Bela Karolyi litter, which is part of the problem. Karolyi has spent the last decade hugging his national champions Kristie Phillips, Kim Zmeskal and now Moceanu on TV.
Shrug has always been the ``other'' girl, the second light in a one-star constellation. Yet she is a heck of a gymnast, a two-time Olympian who has been an important role player in whatever success the U.S. team has had the past five years.
That success extended to the first day of Olympic team competition Sunday, which the U.S. women, considered the country's best team ever, ended .127 behind the fearsome Russians, and .531 ahead of the Romanians after the compulsories.
Miller (39.061) finished on the heels of Ukrainian leader Lilia Podkopayeva (39.149) with her composite scores on the uneven bars, balance beam, floor exercise and vault. Moceanu was fifth at 38.824. No surprises there.
Strug, though, was the engine who kept everything on track and drew some of the wildest applause from the Georgia Dome crowd of 32,530.
Handed the difficult chore of starting two rotations to set the tone and capping the other two, Shrug performed to the letter of the U.S. coaching staff's plan.
Had she faltered at all, the U.S. would be no better than third entering Tuesday's optional finals. Instead, Shrug outperformed Dawes 38.662 to 38.599 and even brought the house down with a floor exercise that drew the day's second-highest score, 9.825.
Not only that, Strug made the U.S. coaches, that mix of U.S. federation and individual coaches who sometimes combust when together, look like geniuses.
On the apparatus Strug was chosen to start - bars and vault - she set a solid baseline for the other gymnasts to build upon. On the ones she was asked to close - vault and floor - Strug completed surges in which each U.S. woman improved upon the score of the one who went before.
``It's a little bit nerve-racking to start everyone off,'' Strug said, ``but it was good for me. I think they felt that we needed someone to go up there who would maybe hit without doing an outstanding performance.''
``They want a good, clean set to begin with and build from there. You don't want your worst person, because if they go up there and bomb everyone else sees that and messes up. But you don't want the best person first, obviously, either.''
Strug is that perfect fit. She has never finished higher than third in the U.S. national championships and she never will. She plans to enter UCLA this fall and compete only on collegiate mats, which should be a pleasant return to sanity after so many years in the grinder that is national-team gymnastics.
Going out on an Olympic high, perhaps even as one of the three Anericans who will make Thursday's individual all-around finals based on Sunday's and Tuesday's performances, would be a blow Strug would strike for team players everywhere.
``This has been great, and I really want to enjoy this Olympic experience,'' Strug said. ``But afterward I'm going to go to UCLA and I'm going to get an education. It's not like some of the other people, who are planning on getting endorsements and it's real important that they perform and win the gold medal.''
For themselves, she means. The irony is, if Strug performs like this one more time, it could bring gold to six other women in red, white and blue leotards. ILLUSTRATION: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Kelli Strug goes unnoticed on the high profile women's team, but her
compulsory performance didn't.
KEYWORDS: OLYMPICS 1996 by CNB