Course Correction

by Ginny Gilder

  “Yes, but I didn’t race Bouche. Why didn’t you give me a chance against her?”

  Kris stared at me, squinting slightly as if he didn’t quite understand. “Bouche? She will just be a spare. You want to race her so you can be a spare?”

  “Yeah, you should’ve raced me. It’s not fair. I could’ve beaten her.”

  “You want now a chance to race her? You can race tomorrow if you want. We will do ergometer tests.”

  Now I was staring at Kris.

  What do I do now? Do I take the chance? What if I blow it?

  Silence.

  Not one cheerleading voice spoke up to parry my sudden gutlessness.

  No one said, “No guts, no glory.”

  No one said, “Finally, a fair chance, go for it! You can do it!”

  No one piped up, reminding me, “Think how hard you’ve worked, how much you want this.”

  Not even me.

  Kris was looking directly at me, his hands well apart and raised around his chest, palms upward in a slight shrug as if to say, “It doesn’t matter to me who the spare is. She will not be racing.”

  I turned my hands over and looked at my palms, rampant with running sores and cracked blisters oozing watery serum. They hurt. Exhausted and worn down by the weeks-long selection camp, I’d not bargained for a chance or a choice. I’d sought Kris out to complain, to position myself as a wounded and cheated warrior. Instead, he’d turned the tables on me and given me an opportunity to claim a position on the team in a fair fight.

  “Uh, I don’t think I can do that,” I responded slowly. “My hands are so ripped up, I don’t think I could hold an oar long enough to finish an erg piece.”

  I heard my voice copping out. In disbelief, I saw myself turning away from a fight I’d longed for, one I’d actively sought out and worked for so long and so hard. I didn’t recognize myself. I didn’t know what was happening to me, that my fear of failure had overcome my desire to prove myself.

  “Okay then,” he said as he nodded at me. Our conversation was over. And so was my third consecutive attempt to make a National Team.

  10

  My Yale racing career was over. My four years of eligibility had expired, even though I had one more term of college to complete. I no longer had the cover of college sports to obscure my training for the Olympics. I had no proof of progress with which to console or inspire myself. The real world of college graduation and employment beckoned. Time was running out on my dream of greatness.

  Four years as a solidly successful varsity athlete on a superior college crew made no ripple in my thinking. Three years of rejection from three different National Team coaches, however, reverberated. Three hard-thrown, hard-to-ignore punches in the stomach: not good enough, not good enough, not good enough.

  I couldn’t get anyone to want me. I had convinced no one to take a risk on me. No one had discerned any flicker of something special to invest in and build on. I wasn’t worth a leap of faith.

  Yet, I couldn’t stop myself. Last chance, last chance. The longing would not die quietly. The 1980 Olympics hovered on my horizon.

  I started my final term in the autumn of 1979. All the varsity rowers from my senior class, now college graduates, chose to train in New Haven one last time for a shot at the Olympics. Sally Fisher, Elaine Mathies, and Cathy Pew rejoined Mary O’Connor, who had made Kris Korzeniowski’s US team along with Bouche. Having successfully stroked our collegiate crew to a National Championship, Mary stroked the US eight and, sure enough, Bouche was sidelined as a spare. The eight won a bronze in Bled and returned home with visions of gold.

  But Mary brought home more than her medal and a newfound confidence. “You really impressed Kris, Ginny,” she told me one day at the Yale gym. “He thought you were really feisty. You should keep training.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, you could make it. He loves spirited rowers.”

  What? I was shocked to learn that my bailing-out of the erg test he had offered hadn’t torched my credibility. I didn’t flunk that test of character after all.

  My father thought it was ridiculous. Three strikes and you’re out, as far as he was concerned. “It’s time to grow up and enter the adult world,” he said. “You’ll be graduating in December. What about finding a job?”

  “Dad, you don’t understand! I want to make the National Team. I came so close last time.”

  “You’ve tried out three years in a row. The market’s trying to tell you something. You’re just not good enough.” My father could read the writing on the wall, even if I wouldn’t.

  He’d been a good supporter for four years. Yes, he had jazzed me about rowing, applying his trademark teasing to test and toughen me, but he’d made his share of trips to Derby to stand on the dock and witness the last snippet of many victories. He’d taken my phone calls and listened to my reports of team victories and private failures. He had followed my story closely, but now he was ready to turn the page and move on.

  To get him off my back, I told my father I would stop training. But I kept showing up at the boathouse and heading to the gym. The heart wants what the heart wants.

  Morning lifting sessions joined afternoon rows, and soon double workouts framed my waking hours once again. As the semester wound down, I prepared for my final exams and completed my senior essay.

  I broached the truth with my father shortly before coming home for the Christmas holidays: “Dad, I’ve decided to keep rowing. I have to try out for the Olympic team. It’s just one more try. A few more months.”

  He sighed and said, “Well, as long as you can support yourself, I guess it’s up to you.” At least he knew enough not to waste his breath on a done deal.

  I didn’t relish the idea of staying in New Haven through one more winter, training in the steamy bowels of Payne Whitney. No matter. I organized every logistic to further my task of making the Olympic team. I tossed my newly minted BA certificate into a cardboard box, landed a menial job at Yale Medical School filling out grant application forms, and fed my training habit. I swallowed workouts like a whale gulps minnows. I welcomed the flow of physical challenges that defined my days, the twice-daily tide of workouts that washed away everything else.

  In the four years since I had first learned to row and fallen hook, line, and sinker for my beloved sport, I had developed a prodigious appetite for the work involved. Instead of five to six weekly workouts, the number rose to ten, eleven, twelve, depending on the week. The quantity of total work multiplied, as each workout grew longer, with more exercises, more minutes, and more repetitions to complete.

  I never had a chance to feel lonely as I submersed myself in the deep, narrow pursuit of rowing excellence. Every day I greeted Mary, Cathy, Bouche, Sally, and Elaine at the gym, just as I had for the past four years. Even though we were no longer training for the Yale team, we still regarded each other as teammates. Unspoken was the obvious truth that most of us wouldn’t make the Olympic team. But that was for later, under the faraway cloud of the selection process, which would take place in Princeton again, starting in early May. We focused on the now: today’s weight circuit, tank session, or stair run. The future would arrive soon enough. We had to be ready.

  I had tried out three years in a row and ended up empty-seated every time. Any sane person would’ve acknowledged the obvious: it was time to give up and move on with life. But I never questioned the relevance or purpose of my goal. I just had to work harder, want it more, and prove myself tougher. Maybe I could make things happen. Maybe what I did would make a difference.

  Just one more time, one more time. I know I can make it this time. I chanted encouragement to myself repeatedly, in spite of my exhaustion, my asthma attacks, and the writing on that damn wall.

  Global geopolitics wreaked havoc on my dreams more fully than any coach. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the last week of 1979, ostensibly to support the country’s prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, whose attempt to reduce the influence of Islam
and introduce a more Western approach had triggered a civil war. Muslim leaders declared a jihad on him, joining the Mujahideen, a guerilla opposition group, to overthrow the Amin government.

  The Soviets then proceeded to assassinate Prime Minister Amin, replacing him with Babrak Karmal, another local leader, but one who depended on the Russian military’s support to maintain his position. Naturally, the Mujahideen weren’t wildly enthusiastic about this arrangement either, but the Soviets claimed the Amin government had requested military aid to maintain its democratically elected hold on the country: they had simply selflessly responded to prevent the Afghan government’s downfall at the hands of a terrorist group.

  At any rate, the Mujahideen wanted their country back and generously extended their jihad to include the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the United States, embroiled in the Cold War and dedicated to preventing the spread of communism, interpreted the Soviets’ maneuvers as an invasion of Afghanistan with an end goal of transforming the country into another communist bulwark. Of course, the West could not allow another country to join the Communist Bloc.

  American foreign policy was headed by a president ostensibly dedicated to peace, generally not a problematic concept, but Jimmy Carter was also struggling politically. Halting the spread of Communism was not the only issue his administration had on its plate. All was not copacetic on the country’s domestic front. Going into an election year, Carter’s presidency was marred by the US energy crisis and the long lines at gas stations, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, rising unemployment, and inflation that exceeded 10 percent. The November 4 seizure of the US Embassy in Teheran added an international flavor to the pervasive scent of defeat wafting around the president. He could not risk further accusations of weakness.

  Determined that no soldiers would die during his presidential tenure, when faced with out-and-out aggressive behavior by his number-one Cold War opponent, President Carter faced limited options to encourage the Soviets to do the right thing. What’s a president to do when all military options are off the table?

  Certainly, celebration was not the order of the day, so Carter chose the role of party pooper. He tried to cancel a world party, the one held every four years in the name of global peace. On January 20, 1980, he wrote a letter to the US Olympic Committee president, Robert Kane, advocating that if the Soviets did not withdraw from Afghanistan within a month, the USOC should petition the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to relocate the Olympic Games scheduled for late July in Moscow or cancel them.

  The president publicized his position during his State of the Union Address on January 23: “And I have notified the Olympic Committee that with Soviet invading forces in Afghanistan, neither the American people nor I will support sending an Olympic team to Moscow.” He set a deadline for the Soviets to withdraw: February 20.

  Since the establishment of the modern Olympic movement in 1896, only World Wars I and II had succeeded in aborting the Games. Now the leader of the free world had determined that abrogating Olympic participation would somehow bolster the prospects for world peace.

  That night, in one fell misguided swoop, Jimmy Carter single-handedly threatened the dreams of several thousand athletes around the globe. Over the next several months, he used the power of his office to destroy them. Not only did every American athlete lose a cherished opportunity to compete at the Games, but the US government successfully pressured allies and friends worldwide to join the boycott as well.

  February 20 found me competing against Sally Fisher in the main stairwell of Payne Whitney, racing through our sets of chest-burning ascents.

  “Why are we doing this?” I gasped at the end of one set. “The boycott is now official. The Soviets haven’t withdrawn from Afghanistan.”

  “I know. But we have three more sets to finish.” Sally turned to jog down the stairs. I followed her silently, saving my breath.

  I didn’t know about all the machinations occurring behind the scenes to try to save the Olympics. I knew the name Anita DeFrantz because she was a 1976 Olympic medalist, a member of the bronze-winning US women’s eight; because she had earned a reputation in the women’s rowing world as an unflinching and powerful competitor, and was a member of the National Team cadre of athletes who trained and raced out of Vesper Boat Club in Philadelphia; and because she rowed on the starboard side, like I did, and therefore was my direct competitor for one of the coveted eight starboard seats (four in the eight, two in the four, and two spares) that would be filled at the Olympic selection camp. In February, I knew nothing else about her, but by June, I would know much more.

  A newly minted lawyer, Anita spearheaded an athletes’ protest of President Carter’s decision to boycott the Olympics. Obviously, the Soviet military would not be deterred from its geopolitical goals by an American president’s facile sacrifice of a group of athletes. Not only that, the president’s interference in the actions of private citizens represented a fundamental violation of democracy.

  Finally, Carter’s action threatened the Olympic movement, its role in promoting world peace, and its apolitical status, designed to operate independently of and beyond the control of world governments. The connections that occur when individual athletes meet and compete in harmony, and pursue a shared purpose on a world stage in full view of people from all over the globe who share in those moments and claim them for their own offer vivid examples of a world that, despite the vast differences and disagreements, can unite in a shared experience.

  Politicizing the Games undermined their future, too, but the week after Carter’s State of the Union announcement, the House and Senate passed resolutions to support the president’s decision by overwhelming margins. On February 9, the IOC rejected the United States’ request to change the venue for the Moscow Olympics or cancel the Games.

  Even the improbable victory of the US men’s hockey team over the Soviets in the medals round at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, on February 22 couldn’t shake the country’s resolve to pursue the boycott of Moscow’s Games. The “Miracle on Ice” provided all the evidence needed to showcase the Olympic spirit, as the men’s team came from nowhere to challenge “The Big Red Machine,” a team that had defeated the Americans 10–3 in their last pre-Olympic competition, and sent the entire country into a frenzy.

  Five weeks later, on the first day of spring, Anita visited the White House in the company of approximately 150 Olympic aspirants, seeking to suggest an alternative that would serve the President’s publicly stated goal to protest the Soviets’ behavior without ruining the upcoming Games: send the US delegation to Moscow, let the athletes compete, but pull them from the opening ceremonies, which were broadcast worldwide. Designate a single representative, one lone athlete to carry the stars and stripes into the stadium, and deliver a visual message the Soviets and the worldwide television audience would understand. Our country’s absence from Moscow would gain nothing, but lose much.

  President Carter was not interested in reconsidering; he granted none of the Olympians an opportunity to speak, but hogged the podium for himself. “I understand how you feel,” he asserted and then proceeded to defend his decision, stating, “What we are doing is preserving the principles and the quality of the Olympics, not destroying it.” His assertion demonstrated profound ignorance of the purpose and promise of the Olympic movement.

  On April 12, pressured by the country’s leaders and threatened by its financial sponsors, the USOC delegates voted by nearly a twoto-one margin to boycott the Moscow Olympics. Joined by eighteen other athletes, one coach, and a lone USOC official, Anita took one final legal step to fight the boycott, filing a suit against the USOC to force the committee to field a team. The suit and its subsequent appeal lost.

  Nonetheless, all over the country, American Olympic aspirants kept pursuing their dreams. The president had destroyed their opportunity to represent their country, but these athletes persisted in fulfilling the part of their dreams that they could still control. Every single
National Team vowed to complete their selection process for the upcoming Olympics. They named 461 athletes to 22 teams, from archery to yachting—including athletics, basketball, boxing, canoe-kayak, cycling, diving, equestrian, fencing, field hockey, gymnastics, judo, modern pentathlon, rowing, shooting, soccer, swimming, volleyball, water polo, wrestling, and weightlifting. Playing matches throughout the month of March in San Jose, California, and Edwardsville, Illinois, the men’s soccer team earned a spot in Olympic competition. Trials for the women’s Olympic basketball team took place in Colorado Springs in late March. After the USOC’s April 22 vote to boycott Moscow, USA Swimming held its Olympic trials in Irvine, California. On May 24, the men’s marathon trials took place in the humidity of Buffalo, New York, led for thirteen miles by a competitor who wore a T-shirt proclaiming “The Road to Moscow Ends Here.” The US Track and Field trials ran in Eugene, Oregon, from June 21 to 29, ending less than three weeks before the Olympics’ July 19 start date.

  Because the Olympic Rowing team would still be named, I still had a job to do. But maintaining focus grew increasingly difficult. It was a confusing time. Training for the Olympics had traditionally been a point of pride. Suddenly I felt like a traitor, pursuing a dream in defiance of the president’s orders. I lived in the greatest country in the world. I was forced to sacrifice my biggest aspiration for the cause of world freedom, and I was behaving like an ingrate. Citizens of every generation fought for our country and laid down their lives, and I, given an opportunity to do my part for the greater good, no loss of life required, was not stepping up gladly and generously. Even my own family berated me for opposing the president’s policy. Coming home for a weekend visit, I couldn’t avoid discussion about the boycott. “It’s just sports, not that big a deal,” my stepmother lectured me.

  Outrage ballooned inside me. “What do you know?” I demanded. I couldn’t articulate the rest of my retort, but rowing, competing, and challenging myself beyond the ordinary felt pretty big to me. Sport is one among many human endeavors, one possible path in the search for meaning, self-expression, and purpose. It is intimately personal and universally important, this business of striving beyond one’s limits, of aspiring to perfection and inevitably falling short, failing, and risking again, reaching ever higher, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.