Second ThoughtsFollowing his wife's near-fatal accident, Vitaly Scherbo started pondering life beyond the gymby Brian Cazeneuve
Whenever it is time for Vitaly Scherbo to prepare for a major gymnastics competition, he leaves the house he owns on a tree-lined street in State College, Pa., and returns home to Minsk, the gray, decrepit industrial city that is the capital of Belarus. He goes there to find his nerve: that me-against-the-world impetus that four years ago drove him to a record six gymnastics gold medals at the Barcelona Games. For Scherbo, there is nothing that steels him for competition like the memories evoked by the forbidding streets of his birthplace.
On Glabky Prospect, where Vitaly lived when he was five, his father left him and his mother, Valentina, a schoolteacher, to fend for themselves. On Gerasimenko Prospect, where Vitaly lived in a small apartment with his new wife, Irina, in 1992, a trusted friend stole his post-Olympic earnings. On Storojevskaya Prospect, along the Svislach River, where Irina walked their daughter, Kristina, in a stroller, passersby wondered aloud what price the baby's new clothes would fetch if they swiped them. "Conditions are a joke there," he says in good English. "Petrol is gone. Heat is off. Everywhere happens crime. And the food so scarce."
Nevertheless, Scherbo returned to that place to prepare himself for the Atlanta Games. And after the near tragedy that struck his family in State College last winter, leaving him in emotional tatters, he was counting more than ever on the grim reminders in Minsk to stoke his competitive fires.
On Dec. 13, when Irina left the house to go to a hair salon, temperatures hovered around 30° and a light drizzle formed patches of ice on the roads in State College. She recalls nothing of the moment when her BMW sedan slid sideways into a telephone pole. Later that day police showed photos of the wreckage to Ed Isabelle, a local gymnastics coach who had taken the Scherbos in when they first came to the U.S., in February 1993. "The car's front and back had bent around the pole and reconnected to each other," Isabelle recalls. "The first thing I said was, 'My god, she's dead, isn't she?' Nobody could have survived that."
Irina was airlifted to Geisinger Medical Center, 80 miles away in Danville, where Dr. Matthew Indeck recalls finding her "in severe hemorrhagic shock with not much chance of survival."
Indeck removed Irina's ruptured spleen and began repairing a lacerated liver and fractures of the ribs and pelvis. It was four days before the bleeding completely stopped.
Scherbo stood watch over his wife's listless body, dozing against the bed rail. Periodically he left her to visit a nearby bar, where he drank vodka and sank into a stupor. Vitaly Scherbo, whose command of the gymnastics apparatuses was remarkable, had no control over what was going on in that hospital room. His grief was unremitting. "You could see it when he opened her purse," Isabelle says. "He took out her scarf, gazed into it, smelled it, brushed it against the side of his face. Every object had a memory for him."
In Barcelona, Scherbo flew through the air with the greatest of ease—and won six gold medals.
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It took the arrival of Scherbo's best friend, Alexander Kolyvanov, a former Soviet teammate and now an assistant coach at the University of Iowa, to revive him. "When I saw him the first time, I didn't recognize his face," Kolyvanov says. "He looked old, like he was trying to [convalesce] with her. I told him right in his face, 'You have to live. She needs to have a strong man, not like drunk, not weak crying baby.'"
Kolyvanov kept Scherbo dry, dragged him to a gym for modest workouts and persuaded him to stay active in the hospital. Scherbo heeded his friend's prodding. He learned to read the oxygenation tank and memorized the function of every tube running into and out of Irina's body. He dressed the walls with pictures of himself and Kristina so Irina could wake to their smiles if he wasn't there. He played her favorite music, and then he rewound the tape and played it again.
Four weeks after the accident, Irina squeezed Vitaly's hand for the first time. She didn't believe a month had passed until she saw how much Kristina had changed. And Vitaly had changed too. "I remember his face," Irina says. "I saw that he was in love only with me, and that was the totality of his emotion. I tell you, that pulled me back to life. Maybe in the past his mind was in the gym. Now when he goes away, he calls twice a day: 'Irina, you must eat.'"
"O.K., so I became nicer," Vitaly, 24, admits, "but that had already started. When I got married and I lived in the States, it made me to think as an adult, not always angry."
A hint of his metamorphosis surfaced during a press conference at the 1995 world championships in Sabae, Japan, when a reporter asked about Scherbo's fluctuating waistline as the gymnast licked beer suds from his lips. "How do you like that beer, and how much weight have you gained?"
"My beer is fine," he answered. "Would you like some?"
Scherbo first vaulted into the international gymnastics spotlight as an 18-year-old in 1990, when he won three gold medals at the European championships in Lausanne, Switzerland, and then won the all-around title at the Goodwill Games in Seattle. He was a highly skilled gymnast, but he had a petulant edge to his personality that wore thin on his teammates. Kolyvanov recalls the day Scherbo was trying some new moves on the pommel horse at a national training camp. Valentin Mogilny, a former world champion on the horse and five years Scherbo's senior, was observing, and when he tried to replicate Scherbo's routine he slipped off the apparatus. Scherbo prodded Mogilny with trash talk, and the two had their first of several run-ins that year.
Former Soviet coach Leonid Arkaev would roll his eyes as his team marched silently, single file, attired in CCCP warmups, into practice halls with Scherbo bringing up the rear—boom box blaring, shoulders bobbing, tattered Mickey Mouse shirt on backward. "Vitaly has a very high appreciation for Vitaly," Arkaev explained. "He likes to admire himself from different angles."
When it came to enforcing curfew after three-a-day training sessions on the Black Sea, Arkaev had trouble with more team members than just Scherbo. "We had a work-hard, play-hard rule," Kolyvanov says. "They told us, 'In bed by 11.' Then as soon as the coach called, 'Lights off,' we would explore the world, to find girlfriends or something."
Such was Vitaly's lifestyle until he met Irina, a sports acrobat, at the Moscow Sports Center. Three weeks later he promised Kolyvanov that he would marry her. "His confidence just killed me," Irina recalls. "This is so great in a man. He didn't show off, but he was so honest and straight. He would not hide from any situation. He didn't let me go. He would take my hand and I couldn't do anything. It was like animal or something."
The couple wed in December 1991, three months after Scherbo won an all-around silver at his first world championships. "I was so mad at that," he says. "I knew I was the best, but my landings were not good. I told myself, O.K, you stick every dismount in Barcelona." He promised his mother three Olympic gold medals, but he did better than that, returning home with team, all-around and four apparatus titles.
However, when the Soviet Union broke up into independent republics in 1991, the national sports system that had guaranteed Soviet stars a cushy, protected life also fell apart. Based on the roughly $18,000 that Soviet athletes were paid for each gold medal won at the 1988 Seoul Games, Scherbo expected to receive in excess of $100,000. Instead, he didn't get half that amount, and what's more, Belarussian sports officials wanted him to funnel his earnings from exhibition tours through their Olympic committee, which would keep 30%. "I told them, 'I did more for your country than all of your fabrics, all of your exports,'" Scherbo says. "Before me, the world asks, What is it, Belarus? And for this they give me special tax?"
Irina barely survived the accident in State College last December.
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Scherbo kept his post-Olympic savings ($21,000 U.S. and 8,000 Swiss francs) in his flat on Gerasimenko Prospect. But once, when his childhood teammate Nikolai Tikhonovich came over to borrow money, Scherbo mistakenly allowed Tikhonovich to see where it was hidden. The next day, Scherbo learned later, Tikhonovich and two other men broke into the empty apartment and stole the cash. Six months later the thieves were arrested, but the money was never recovered.
During one of his post-Olympic tours, Scherbo told a U.S. national team assistant coach, Soviet émigré Yefim Furman, that Irina was pregnant and he wanted the baby to be born in the States so it would have U.S. citizenship. Furman often trained at a gymnastics academy Isabelle owned in Woodward, Pa., 25 miles outside State College, and he asked Isabelle to take Vitaly and Irina in. After an eight-month stay with Isabelle, during which Vitaly remained in the U.S. on a work visa, the Scherbos returned to Belarus in September 1993 with their six-month-old baby.
Despite having two cars stolen, they planned to remain in Minsk—until the day two summers ago when Irina overheard the men talking of stealing Kristina's clothes. Soon after, the Scherbos bought their place in State College, where they spend up to 10 months of the year. When he is not competing around the world Vitaly trains at the Woodward Academy and occasionally works with the aspiring gymnasts.
Even though a chronically sore left shoulder twice caused him to miss a week of training this year, Scherbo won three medals, including a gold in the floor exercises, at the world championships in April, and the following month he won three golds in the European championships. Before each of those competitions he returned to Minsk, and in May he went back again to gird himself for the Olympics. After a brief vacation in Italy, he came straight to Atlanta in late June to begin his final tune-up.
Competing for the first time in the Olympics as an independent nation, Belarus, led by Scherbo's 115.210 individual points, finished fourth in the men's team competition on Monday, then Scherbo won the bronze in the individual all-around on Wednesday. He blamed the judges for his failure to repeat as gold medalist, saying Li Xiaoshuang of China, the winner, had received more favorable scoring than he did. The men's six individual apparatus golds will be contested tonight and tomorrow night at the Georgia Dome.
Scherbo had hoped to repeat his Barcelona success in Atlanta, seeing these Games as his opportunity to shift into a leadership role in gymnastics worldwide. He will be easing out of competition. After he performs with other world champions on a 60-city post-Olympic tour, he wants to open his own gym in Pennsylvania and work to popularize the sport—perhaps even help run it someday.
Irina with Kristina in June.
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"If I win more medals," he said last month, "I can make my future. I can introduce gymnastics so kids will love it. Then I take out maybe half of judges, the dishonest ones. I do everything gymnasts and coaches want me to do. Then we have a good time, because I change everything."
And there will no longer be a need for the treks to Minsk.
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