Course Correction

by Ginny Gilder

  I couldn’t say any of that sophisticated stuff. My stepmother’s smugness made me feel small and wrong, as if I were still a child, especially because she was echoing the opinions of millions of Americans: “People are dying all over the world, and all you care about is yourself.”

  Everything felt like an outrage. No one would stand up for me, not even my own father, who knew how much I ached to make the team and was ordinarily an avid supporter of individual rights and small government.

  All the knowledge I had accumulated from rowing seemed to vanish. Was BG right? Should I just buck up and shut up, take the medicine my own country has prescribed, and do my part?

  Although I left the room and the argument with BG, my thoughts kept coming. I went to my bedroom and flung myself down on my bed. As I lay there, eyes closed, images of rowing flowed by and I regained my calm clarity. This is not bad or wrong. Nothing that can make me so alive and can teach so much could be pointless. Never before had loving something set me apart as a pariah, but I would not walk away.

  Of course, I was in no position to sacrifice anything, yet. I wasn’t an Olympian, merely a wannabe. As much as the pall of disgust and dismay over the president’s dictum hung over the spring weather, I still had nothing concrete to whine about. All I could do was stay focused, keep training, and make that damn team. Until that happened, the boycott was irrelevant.

  Somehow, I stayed on track. I garnered yet another invitation to a selection camp. I survived another training camp in placid Princeton. I kept my anger in check and poured my anxiety and eagerness into the strokes I took during the extended tryout sessions. I kept my distance from the coaches: Kris K, the National Team coach from the previous year, and Nat, who’d been named as the assistant Olympic coach. Just my luck. I was the same size as I had been nearly five years earlier when I approached him on the Old Campus at Yale as a curious freshman, when he turned away from me before I even had a chance to introduce myself. I was the same size as I had been two years earlier when he unceremoniously cut me from the European Tour squad. I was part of the juggernaut of one of the university’s most successful athletic teams. I helped catapult him to the top of the women’s collegiate coaching pile, yet I knew he’d cut me in a second, given half a chance. I didn’t talk with him, except when necessity required interaction.

  On the morning Kris announced he would post the final roster for the Olympic team after practice, I froze. I had waited for this moment, had done everything I could, had maintained my focus and confidence, had held my tongue, and given no coach any excuse to strike my name from the list. I had rowed hard and well in practice after practice. I’d pulled consistently, stroke after stroke, and prevailed in every test. And I dreaded the humiliation to come.

  The entire flock of aspirants crowded around the flimsy sheet of paper Kris posted on the boathouse door. The mass of people was impossible to plow through. I waited, motionless, my gaze fixed on the floor.

  Don’t get your hopes up! Remember, remember, you’re not good enough … The market, the market, it’s telling you something, it’s told you you’re nothing. Walk away, walk away now! Your name is not on that list.

  Could it happen just this once? For once could I find a happy ending?

  The crowd thinned quickly; the group of nearly three dozen women knew how to read their own names. I stepped up. Ready to greet the demons of disappointment. Ready to blame myself for dreaming too large and wanting too much, for thinking I could grasp what my heart desired.

  Alphabetical. By last name. I forced myself to start at the top, scanned BARBER, BARNES, BOWER, BROWN, but I wasn’t solidly in control. My eyes darted down to the middle of the page. I caught GRAVES. I was breathless with the effort of maintaining some modicum of control. Okay, too far. Back up.

  Try to look cucumber cool on the outside. Don’t let anyone think this is a make-or-break moment. You’ve been here before. You’re ready, braced for another slug of disappointment, ready for another free fall. Taking a deep breath, I blinked, savoring my hope for one last moment. I looked.

  GILDER.

  I stood staring at the sheet. The news crashed into my heart, stunning me, and then took another beat to reach my brain. Zipping to make the connection, racing ahead and calling back to the rest of me, gleeful and triumphant, my emotions shouted back to my reason: Gilder, your name is on the list!

  I forced my eyes back to the middle of the page. There it was, just above GRAVES, below DREWSON. GILDER. The headline at the top of the page, 1980 OLYMPIC ROWING TEAM, in Korzeniowski’s scrawl made it real.

  Standing there, my eyes stretched wide and my mouth curving upward, I felt the jumbling inside me sort into a new order. I watched myself toss off the weight of hopeful, fearful aspirant I had lugged around for eons, walk across this brand-new territory, step up to and dance through the door marked “Olympian,” across an interior and private threshold between wannabe and made-it.

  As I accepted the congratulations of the other athletes, I looked back across that threshold and saw the door to my past shove shut with a firm click.

  It happened in an instant. It had taken years. It would last forever.

  11

  I had prowled outside the National Team village for so long, shaking the locked gates, trying to force my way in. Now the doors had opened, granting me unfettered access.

  As members of the Olympic team, we settled into our roles and bonded. In slogging through tough daily workouts, we compressed years of learning about each other into mere weeks: together we endured the ordeal of training for a competition we were banned from entering and dealt with the loss of what should have been our shining moment in the Olympic sun. Lifelong friendships emerged, bits of gold shining through the pressure cooker of intense preparation.

  I hadn’t made new friends in a long time. National Team tryouts were hardly conducive to the vulnerability required to forge new connections. During the previous selection processes, I put all my energy into maintaining my internal equilibrium. I had become an expert outsider, but I was inside now.

  The top boat was the eight. I was named to the second boat—the four with coxswain—along with several other first-time Olympians who were also novice National Team members. Besides me, Val McClain (our coxswain), Sue Tuttle, Kathy Keeler, and Hope Barnes, who battled the experienced and famous Anita DeFrantz for the bow seat and ultimately lost, were newbies. I ended up liking them all, but two stood out.

  First, there was Hope. Tall, lean, and serious, she rowed in the seven seat of the University of Pennsylvania crew that claimed the Eastern Sprints title right before the Olympic selection camp began. She was a confident multisport athlete, an excellent rock climber and skier, and an accomplished scholar, preparing to enter graduate school in medicinal chemistry. Focused, organized, and efficient, she managed to pack all her interests into her life and still had time for fun and games. We shared a broad swath of commonalities beyond rowing. We both hailed from complicated families riven by divorce and could recognize the subtext of sorrow in the descriptions we offered each other of our backgrounds. We also set our sights beyond rowing, albeit for different reasons: Hope was genuinely drawn to her academic career, while I knew I could not dally long in my sport without losing critical family support.

  I learned firsthand about Hope’s penchant for silly humor early in our friendship. Introducing me to her older sister, Faith, Hope proceeded to regale me with stories of her other siblings, sister Charity and brothers Patience and Earnest. Wide-eyed at the thought of such a pure family, I initially missed the twinkle in her eye and the grin beneath her serious expression. After that, she never let me live down my gullibility, teasing me whenever her sister’s name came up.

  Then there was Kathy Keeler. We had actually met the previous summer, at Kris K’s Princeton selection camp. Because she rowed port to my starboard, we were not direct competitors, making the prospect for friendship more promising. At the last practice before the 1979 National Team was named, we
were sent out alone to row in a pair while the rest of the crew went out with the coaches in eights. Kathy correctly intuited that we were both about to be cut. We spent our last practice paddling instead of doing the hard strokes Kris had assigned us, grousing about the likelihood of our fast-approaching date with failed destiny and plotting how to make the cut next year.

  I’d never heard a fellow National Team aspirant voice some of the thoughts that ran through my head, questioning the fairness of the selection process and griping about having to accede to a system that stripped her of any control. Listening to Kathy, I felt some sense of connection. Now as Olympic teammates, spending concentrated time together, our friendship blossomed.

  Kathy was a no-bullshit straight talker who didn’t waste words: she either kept quiet or spoke her mind plainly. She didn’t waste time posturing or manipulating. She wasn’t shy about her aspirations, nor did she worry about measuring up. For her, only Olympic gold would suffice. I admired her forthrightness and her lack of concern about others’ opinions of her. I was awed by how matter-of-factly she spoke of her dreams without hedging.

  In late June, when the men’s and women’s Olympic teams joined up in Lucerne, Switzerland, to race, Kathy set her romantic sights on one of the men’s coaches, Harry Parker, who was coaching the men’s eight.

  Harry was no average Olympic coach. He was the best of the best: the head of the venerable Harvard University rowing program and one of the country’s premier rowing coaches. He had compiled one of the most impressive résumés in rowing, but he barely spoke enough to boast of anything. He was a classic demonstration of actions speaking louder than words, and his bellowed volumes.

  Following his fifth place finish in the men’s single sculls event at the Rome Olympics and a brief stint as the Harvard freshman heavyweight coach, Harry assumed the varsity coach position in the spring of 1963 and compiled a tremendous record of coaching achievements. In his twenty-three years with the varsity, Harry coached his crews to a dozen Eastern Sprints Championships. They won the San Diego Crew Classic three times and were acknowledged as the National Champions half a dozen times. During his tenure, thirty-four Harvard varsity athletes competed for the United States on at least one Olympic team. And for eighteen consecutive years, his crews trounced the Yale men in the annual four-mile dual-boat race. Every true blue Yale rower and alumnus regarded Harry as evil incarnate.

  Harry also coached his share of World Championship, Pan American, and Olympic team boats. He had coached an American crew in each of the past four Olympics, dating back to 1964, including the United States’ first women’s Olympic eight. In both 1975 and 1976, he served as the head women’s coach, and his crews won back-to-back medals those years—silver in Nottingham, England, and our country’s first women’s Olympic sweep rowing medal, the bronze.

  Kathy showed excellent taste. The guy was a stud. In American elite rowing circles, Harry was often cited, affectionately or derisively, as the God of Rowing.

  Yet, for the life of me, I couldn’t fathom Kathy’s attraction. Harry was good-looking enough: ruggedly attractive with deep tan lines creasing his face, above-average tall, fit and strong, with ropy muscles and tousled, thinning blond hair. But he was much older than she, divorced, with two boys nearing college age. And the guy was just too damn quiet. His sparse use of words and his typically serious demeanor put me off. He was so remote.

  Clearly the strong, silent type appealed to Kathy. In no time, she decided he was the man for her. She recounted the details of her late-night escapades, sneaking out of her room to meet Harry on the sly. By the end of the summer, the secret was out and they were an item, working their way into a long-term relationship.

  That must’ve been why I liked Kathy. She wasted no time in going for what she wanted, ignored the outside world’s odds-making regarding her prospects for success, and never got sidetracked by internal dithering or paltry self-confidence. Over the course of our brief summer racing schedule, we cemented our friendship, which would blossom over the next few years when she made the Boston area her home base, allowing her to date Harry and train hard with me.

  In 1980, while athletes from eighty countries prepared for the Olympic Games, the US women’s rowing team prepared to race together in two European regattas and then disband at the end of June. The full impact of the boycott finally landed on me, a meteor from outer space, destroying my world. Now that I had earned the right to represent my country, I couldn’t.

  Anita DeFrantz’s final end-run attempt around the boycott—a petition to the International Olympic Committee to grant the US athletes permission to compete under the Olympic flag—failed. When the US State Department threatened to revoke our passports, our dream of competing at the Moscow Games finally died, leaving only bitterness and regret.

  Joining us in our misery, athletes from sixty countries lined up behind the United States and boycotted the Moscow Games. The US government stilled the dreams of Olympians from all over the world, including Japan, China, West Germany, Argentina, the Philippines, and Canada. Many attending countries did not participate in Moscow’s opening ceremonies, and sixteen countries did not allow their athletes to compete under their national flags. Instead, the Olympic anthem replaced their national anthems at medal ceremonies. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Australia, supported the boycott but sent smaller delegations, allowing their athletes to choose whether to participate.

  As the countdown to Moscow’s opening ceremonies neared its end, the women’s Olympic rowing team traveled to Switzerland to race on Lake Lucerne, my first international regatta. Organized as a pre-Olympic regatta, Lucerne was intended to give crews experience for the real deal and meant nothing as a stand-alone performance, but for us Americans, it was freighted with extra meaning.

  At the race course, various languages floated through the air. Crews from different countries intermingled. Rowers in colorful National Team uniforms carried oars and boats back and forth from the docks to the storage areas. Equipment vendors were everywhere, laden with wrenches, screwdrivers, and levels, ready to help coaches tweak the rigging in final preparation for racing. The race course was lined with seven lanes of perfectly straight, pristine white buoys. Giant orange lane markers hovered above each lane at the finish, providing every coxswain an easy target to point toward. Every five-hundred-meter mark was labeled by colored buoys. A huge scoreboard hung at the end of the course facing the grandstands. The scene said it all: rowing was a big deal, boycott or not.

  Beyond the race course, the delights of a foreign country beckoned. I wandered through the streets with Hope, exploring bakeries, sitting in outdoor cafés drinking espresso, and devouring pastries. I sampled raclette and indulged in fondue. We deciphered the unfamiliar public transportation system to get ourselves from our hotel to the course, and walked the streets and canals in the evenings, surrounded by the commingling of French and German spoken by passersby. I loved the poufy comforters that replaced the standard US top sheet and blanket; it was like sleeping under a cloud.

  When it came to racing in Lucerne, our four turned in a pair of nothing-special performances. Not surprising, as it was our crew’s first race together, but disappointing nonetheless, as we had only two chances to race against the lucky, Olympics-bound crews and to measure ourselves against the eventual medal winners. After that, our team drove to Amsterdam, Holland, to race one last time in its pre-Olympic regatta. Our four came in third, a solid performance against the full complement of competitors who would travel within the month to Moscow. To me, that meant we would have been in contention for an Olympic medal.

  But we were not. I got the team-issued gear, the Levi’s and cowboy boots, the gaudy track suit, but I was not a full-fledged Olympian. I traveled under the aegis of USA Rowing, lugged red, white, and blue oars through airports, got my passport stamped with exotic symbols, but I would not be racing when it counted.

  Opening ceremonies in Moscow came and went on July 19. Various ad
justments to Olympic tradition had to be made. Because the boycott prevented Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau from traveling to Moscow, the final torchbearers from the previous Games participated at the opening ceremony in his stead, helping to usher in the start of the Games. At the closing ceremony the Los Angeles city flag—rather than the United States flag—was raised to signal that city as the next host of the Olympic Games. Nor could the mayor of Moscow transfer the Olympic flag to the mayor of Los Angeles to launch the start of the next quadrennium.

  Along with the rest of the US Olympic team, I received an invitation to attend a recognition ceremony in Washington, DC, hosted by the USOC to honor us. Disgusted and disheartened by Carter’s behavior, I decided to remain in Europe instead, along with Hope and Karla Drewson, the stroke of the women’s Olympic eight. The idea of standing anywhere near the president made me gag. I also skipped the mammoth country and western party at Smokey Glen Farm thrown by Levi Strauss & Co., the team’s outfitters; a “Washington After Dark” bus tour with stops at the Lincoln Memorial, Iwo Jima Monument, Jefferson Memorial, and Washington Monument; a fresh seafood dinner at a waterfront restaurant, where the entire staff lined up and feted the team with a ten-minute standing ovation; a special evening performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at Ford’s Theatre, followed by a cast party; a gala at what was then called the Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution; a two-hour parade and concert at the US Marine Barracks, including a performance by the US Marine Band; and, of course, the medals ceremony on the steps of the Capitol, where each athlete stepped up to receive a gold-plated medal from the USOC officers; and the White House reception at the South Lawn, attended by the Carters, including a receiving line and a team picture. All the recognition could not salve the loss I felt at my exclusion from the Games. When the weighty congressional medal that commemorated my sacrifice arrived in the mail, I wrapped it in a cheap plastic bag and stuffed it deep into a basement closet.