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Our Woman In Moscow Jackie Joyner Was Queen Of The Goodwill Games With A Stunning World Record In The Heptathlonby Kenny Moore and Craig Neff Issue date: July 21, 1986
Joyner's coach and husband of six months, UCLA women's coach Bob Kersee, watched, twitching, from the stands. He had known since Joyner's first event the previous day, a scalding 12.85 100-meter hurdles, that she was going to break the world record of 6,946 points held by East Germany's Sabine Paetz. "She was in that zone where you can do exactly what you choose," said Kersee. Through the first day Joyner had high-jumped 6 ft. 2 in., put the shot 48 ft. 5 1/4 in. and sprinted 200 meters in 23 seconds flat. All were personal heptathlon bests. Kersee, however, had set slightly higher goals for Joyner in the high jump and shot. This is one demanding man. "And one hardheaded woman," said Kersee. "That first event kind of . . . exalted her. After that, there was no way to put doubt in her mind." Down the runway she went. Joyner is a born jumper, the holder of the U.S. women's long-jump record of 23 ft. 9 in.. (Her brother, Al, was the 1984 Olympic champion in the triple jump.) Here, the flexibility and power in her hips were obvious even though her run was not a full sprint. At the board she rose and kept rising. She reached the pit still in perfect form. It was a jump fit for a training film. But it wasn't 21 feet. Joyner had gone 23 feet even, the farthest ever by anyone in a heptathlon, and it gave her a staggering 1,176 points for the event. Kersee seemed overcome with the chills. "Now she'll not only be the first woman ever to reach 7,000 points, but 7,100," he said. "I don't know what to say. Or do." He ran up and down the stadium steps, burning raw emotion. Joyner passed her remaining jumps to conserve energy. She moved on to the javelin and with just one throw hit her sixth heptathlon PR of the meet (by almost 16 feet), 163 ft. 7 in.. + Her goal in the concluding 800 meters was 2:10. "I thought maybe we should have her drop it back to 2:15," said Kersee later. "I thought that this would be such a world record that it would make people expect too much of her for the next two years. But then I remembered that we'd always said she could get 7,200. So I let her go." Joyner strode home uncannily close to her target with 2:10.02, worth 964 points. Kersee made his way onto the track and drizzled her with cool water from a drinking bottle. He was trying to hide his tears. Joyner's seven-event total of 7,148 had improved the world record by a stunning 202 points. She had beaten East Germany's Sabila Tile by more than 500. As far as is measurable, she had become history's best all-around female athlete. It was a record that couldn't have come at a better place. On this track in the 1980 Olympics, the U.S.S.R.'s Nadeyzhda Tkachenko became the first woman to go over 5,000 points in the pentathlon. The next year the 200 meters and javelin were added to make the present heptathlon. Here, too, Ted Turner's new, made-for-TV games (see page 55) were trying to define themselves, and performances like Joyner's were giving them some semblance of shape. These games were replete with honest friendship among athletes, but they were burdened with both the questionable sportsmanship of administrators (in track, the Soviets kept adding heats and reshuffling lineups to their best advantage) and the need for constant artificial expressions of international goodwill. "What have you done to promote the goodwill of these games?" one Soviet journalist asked Joyner after her victory. The implication was that winning wasn't enough, that perhaps she ought to issue an appeal to her government to get serious at Geneva, which the Soviet press would be only too glad to print. "I felt the Olympic spirit out there," she said. "And I hope we'll see the Eastern bloc in the 1988 Olympics. Now wouldn't that be showing goodwill?" No more questions. Joyner is the first woman outside the Eastern bloc in almost a decade to hold the pentathlon or heptathlon world record. But last week's events were in some cases redefining the athletic balance of power. In others, the Goodwill competition only made clearer than ever the strength of the communist countries; U.S. cyclists, winners of nine medals at the L.A. Olympics, won but one in Moscow. A highly regarded team of American wrestlers, led by three '84 ( Olympic champions, was tied 5-5 by Bulgaria and as a result didn't even reach the finals, which were won by the Soviets. The Americans might have wrestled for gold, but world and Olympic 180.5-pound champ Mark Schultz was decked by a bad stomach virus; he was disqualified for passivity against Bulgaria and couldn't wrestle at all against Turkey. The U.S fared only slightly better in water polo, winning the silver medal. The world champion Soviets stayed unbeaten through a week of games played in cold, whipping rainstorms, then dominated the U.S. 10-5 for the gold on Sunday night. The Soviet defense shut out the Americans for an entire half and held off five U.S. power plays. The player to score most effectively against the Soviets was actually U.S. goalie Craig Wilson, who came to Moscow newly wed. Back in early 1984, after a tournament in Budapest, Wilson had been drinking vodka with the U.S.S.R. team when a Soviet player, Erikin Shagayev, approached him with a gift, two phone numbers and a story of a U.S. girl he had met at a 1983 tournament in Malibu, Calif. "Please take this to her," Shagayev asked, handing Wilson a tiny package that contained a ring. Wilson complied, but last week he was back with some bad news for Shagayev, who unfortunately was absent. "Remember that ring Erikin gave me?" Wilson told the Soviet players with a grin. "I married her." The U.S. women's basketball team, out to end a quarter century of Soviet dominance in that sport, felt as if it had spent much of the week in a ring -- a boxing ring -- with its opponents from Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. "Everybody's taken a few shots," said team chef de mission Lynn Norenberg. "Katrina McClain got a hematoma when someone kneed her in the thigh, and a couple other girls got elbowed in the throat. But it's nothing we'd use as an excuse." The Americans would need no excuses. They came out of the locker room for Thursday's final against the Soviets whooping and high-fiving and sprinted right into their weave drill. Together in training for only three weeks, they had already shown exceptional speed, defense and depth. Around them a surprisingly American crowd -- seemingly the only full house in a week of sparsely attended Goodwill events -- chanted "U-S-A! U-S-A!" Soviet fans whistled in derision at this blatant show of nationalism, then promptly took up an equivalent chant themselves. The Soviets, unbeaten in major international tournament play since 1958, stood in silence at their end of the court, stretching languidly. The gimpy metaphor for their fortunes was their 7 ft. 2 in., 34-year-old center, Iuliyana Semenova, who hobbled around as if she'd just had surgery on both hips. Semenova had shot 10 for 10 from the floor in the U.S.S.R.'s hard-fought win over Brazil, and American coaches, in a play on her name, kept referring to the "Ooolee factor." "They told me, 'You've got to keep that refrigerator off the boards,' " said U.S. center Anne Donovan. The game was tight for just over 10 minutes, at which point the Soviets led 21-19. Then the U.S. suddenly cut loose with three straight baskets. Semenova missed a horrible lefthanded, flat-footed hook shot and a moment later was convincingly stuffed by the 6 ft. 8 in. Donovan, who didn't even have to jump to do so. With a creak and a groan, the era of the Soviets was ending. Just that morning U.S. coach Kay Yow had installed a new offense to create movement. It allowed the American guards to free-lance, pulling the Soviets out and opening huge holes in the middle. It worked to devastating effect. "When I looked up at the scoreboard we were suddenly up by 10 points -- wait, make that 12, 14, 16. . . ." recalled forward Cheryl Miller later. At the half the U.S. led 39-25. The American fans were so ecstatic they led history's first known crowd wave in the U.S.S.R., which, distressingly enough, drew cheers. By the middle of the second half Soviet spectators were moving in a crowd wave out the nearest exits. While Soviet players stood around like monuments to Lenin and Pushkin, the U.S. cruised home with an 83-60 victory that wasn't nearly that close. "It was as if they gave up," said Donovan. The Americans had outrebounded Semenova & Co. 44-20. Miller had scored 18 points and pulled down 10 rebounds. McClain had added 17 points, and her former Georgia teammate, Teresa Edwards, had 13 points and 7 assists. While the U.S. had beaten Soviet teams twice before in lesser competitions (in 1982 and '83), it had never done so in what was clearly a world-championship caliber event. Players hugged one another and draped themselves in American flags. They talked eagerly of getting back to the States for some cheeseburgers and pizza. Guard Cynthia Cooper, giddy in celebration, lifted her nose regally. "Home, James," she said. The track competition, already elevated by Joyner, had continued on a high plane. Edwin Moses made his way through a confusing 400-meter hurdle race run in two heats, clocking 47.94, and emerged with his nine-year winning streak intact and extended to 96. In the men's 100, there was more confusion. Only half the sprinters seemed to understand that in Moscow, "Vni-ma-nie" means get set. That caused one false start. Then Canada's Ben Johnson, who has been smoldering for months about not being ranked first in the world after beating Carl Lewis last summer, and who beat him again in San Jose in May, jumped too early, saying his blocks had slipped. "He was playing games," said Lewis, who was two lanes away. "Talking, jumping the gun. It's important to him, I guess." Lewis might have guessed what was coming. Johnson, off a good start, bulled ahead at 30 yards. All eyes shifted to Lewis, who hadn't had a bad start himself. But he was third, behind Chida Imott of Nigeria, and he stayed there. Johnson, who has worked hard on his finish, won by a full yard in 9.95, the fastest time ever run at sea level, and just .02 from Calvin Smith's world record, set at altitude. "I am the best in the world," rumbled Johnson. So is the U.S.S.R.'s Sergei Bubka, who on Wednesday night sailed four inches over the crossbar on a world-record pole vault of 19 ft. 8 1/2 in.. The jump raised his old mark by a quarter inch and was the first of Bubka's six outdoor world records to be set in the Soviet Union. "I'm happy to do it in my motherland," he said, "and all compatriots should be happy with me." Had the bar been set higher, the vault would have made him history's first 20-footer. But Bubka chose to vault no more. He blamed the stampede of photographers that surrounded him after the record vault, but they could have been corralled with a wave of his hand. Later Bubka said, "I dedicated this record to my son, Vitaly, whose birthday is today. But, hey, it's only a little present for him. He's just a year old." Bubka will wait, perhaps until August's European Championships in Stuttgart, to show his prodigious best. Late that same night, Doug Nordquist found himself the last American track athlete in competition. Nordquist is a high jumper, Dwight Stones's cousin, and a man of ebullient precision. On his first try at 7 ft. 7 1/4 in. his back, butt, calves and heels all cleared the bar by the same eighth of an inch, and he led world-record holder Igor Paklin of the U.S.S.R. on fewer misses. At 7 ft. 8 in. misses didn't matter because Nordquist made it and Paklin did not. Soon Nordquist was playing the closing scene at Lenin Stadium, standing on the victory platform watching as his flag was raised, laughing, singing the national anthem -- unable to get more than a few words out at a time -- and finally crying joyfully. "Ever since '84 I've wanted to be on that stand," he said. "It was all the dreaming come true. Besides that, I tied the family record." The Soviet press easily drew Nordquist into talk of his feelings for these games. "I was excited to hear about them," he said after the medal ceremony. "I was disappointed in '84 that the U.S.S.R. pulled out of L.A. But it's different here. You can't compare. I can't communicate except with a smile, but the people have been warm. I had my first caviar. . . ." "Can we say then," interrupted the questioner, "that something that is greater than sports competition has begun here?" Nordquist seemed astonished. "I don't know that you could ever say anything was greater than athletic competition," he replied. Issue date: July 21, 1986
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