A Kind of Grace (33 page)

“My leg! It's my leg!” I cried.

She picked up my head and held it in her lap and dusted the tear-soaked sand from my face. Tears welled up in her eyes.

I couldn't move my leg. I thought it was broken. I was terrified. Bobby and Bob Forster, my physical therapist, ran over and kneeled on either side of us.

“It's my leg! It's my leg!” I cried to them. Bob started to examine my knee.

Heike asked if I was okay, and I calmed down.

“Yeah. I'm okay,” I said, nodding. She blinked her eyes at me, her signal that she wished me well. She got up and walked back to the athlete waiting area, as Bobby and Bob continued to poke around my leg.

“No, it's my ankle,” I told them. Bob examined and touched it. A doctor had arrived and he also examined it. It was a slight twist. He asked me to try to get up and stand on it. With Bobby and Bob's help I gingerly stood up in the sand. I put my weight on the ankle and felt okay, just a slight twinge of pain. I walked to the infield.

I sat on the grass with my legs stretched out in front of me. The doctor examined it some more, while Bobby and Bob crouched beside him at my feet. He said it wasn't serious. No broken bones. That's when Bobby told Bob to tape it up if it wasn't broken because he wanted me to take the last jump. I tried running gingerly at first. No pain. I put more pressure on the leg. Still no problem. I ran back and told them it felt okay.

Bob scrambled furiously to wrap the leg, but discovered he didn't have an Ace bandage with him. Ever resourceful, Bobby pulled a 5,000-yen bill out of his pocket and handed it to him. “Here, use this,” he said.

Bob wrapped my ankle with the yen bill, then, as an added prevention against swelling, put a bag of ice on it and secured it with tape, which I kept on until my next jump.

At the line, my ankle was still wrapped with the yen bill. I didn't improve on the last jump and neither did Heike. She needed only 1¼ inches to beat me, but she couldn't pull it off. She didn't use it as an excuse, but I knew she had a knee injury. She came over and congratulated me with tears in her eyes. “You're the best,” she said. I started crying and we embraced.

I prevailed that day at the Worlds. But Heike took home the gold medal a year later at the Barcelona Games and I received the bronze. After my last attempt came up short at the Olympics, I got up, dusted myself off, shook my head once and walked to Heike with a big smile on my face. “Congratulations. Today was your day,” I told her. “
You're
the best.”

As the episode in the sand pit showed, I was closer to Heike than I was to any member of the American long-jump team. We first met in 1985 at a meet in Zurich. Bobby pointed her out to me on the warmup track. I knew she was the young East German long jumper who'd set the world record at the age of eighteen in 1983. Bobby told me she was the best he'd seen and the one to beat. He marveled at her sprinting and jumping ability.

“You're going to have to work hard to beat her,” he said as we stood on the edge of the track, watching her run around, her blond curls and long legs flapping in the breeze as she trotted past us.

Heike was one of the few friendly athletes in the East German track delegation. I knew how careful the athletes from the Eastern Bloc had to be because their coaches and chaperones were watching every move they made and expected them to keep their game faces on at all times. I wouldn't have blamed her if she kept her distance. The only other member of that team who ever behaved civilly to athletes from the West was heptathlete Anke Behmer.

In 1986 at Gotzis, Anke and I had struck up a friendship and she wanted to exchange uniforms with me. She talked to me about it away from the prying ears and eyes of her coach. We made a secret plan to do it at the athletes' banquet that night. Back at my hotel room, I stuffed my uniform in my purse and headed to the dining room. Before dinner, Anke snuck over to me and whispered, “We can't let the boss man see us. I'll go to the bathroom first. Then you come. We'll do it there.”

I kept one eye on her and one on my meal all night. We were sitting across the room from each other. She got up and went to the exit. I waited until she'd disappeared. Then I followed her. In the bathroom, we greeted each other with mischievous smiles and giggles. We quickly pulled the bunched-up uniforms out of our purses, made the switch and shoved them back inside. Anke left first. I waited a minute or two and then walked out. We were never seen together and no one ever knew what we did.

At the Zurich meet, Heike came over and said hello on the warmup track. She had a nice smile. She asked whether Carol Lewis was competing in the long jump. I guess my ego got the best of me, because I thought to myself: “You should be concerned about whether I'm competing!”

Heike was three years younger than me, but she was a world champion before I was. I admired her versatility, her incredible athletic ability and her staying power. She'd dabbled in the sprints and made her Olympic team as a sprinter, posting some of the best times in the world. In fact, she was the one competitor Florence worried about while preparing for the 1988 Olympics.

Our friendship grew through the years and we chatted whenever we could steal a few minutes out of the view of her coaches. On the track, she used eye signals—blinks and winks—whenever she passed me. I'd acknowledge her by smiling or winking back. It added fun to the competition and kept me relaxed. I always knew what her eye signals meant. “Hi! How are you?” or “Nice to see you,” or “Good jump.” In the sand pit that night in Tokyo, the blinks told me she was concerned about me and was relieved I was okay.

Some reporters suggested we'd become friends because we both came from underprivileged backgrounds. Some said Bobby and I sympathized with her because the East German track coaches forced her to compete in too many events. But Heike and I never discussed any of that. We became good friends because we admired each other as athletes. I think, too, that we're both caring people. After the fall of Communism and she was freer to talk, we shared several plane rides together to meets throughout Europe. She pulled out the latest picture of her baby son. Then she started prodding me to have kids. We also talked about visiting each other once we retired and didn't have to worry about rushing back home to resume training.

When she got injured just prior to the 1996 Olympics, Bobby and I sent her a telegram. In it, I told her I could imagine what she was going through and I knew how difficult it must be not being on the Olympic team. She sent me a letter before the Games wishing me luck and told me she was looking forward to our competition in Europe shortly after the Olympics. She made it there, but I didn't, because of my hamstring injury.

28

Anointed

D
espite the twisted ankle from the long jump, I felt fine by the start of the heptathlon the next day at the World Championships. I'd slept with electrical stimulation on my hamstrings the night after the long jump and I was raring to go on the first night of competition.

I had a comfortable lead after three events, heading into the final event of the first night, the 200-meter sprint. But in the 200 meters, as I tried to round the curve, my right leg went crazy. There were 130 meters to go. I was in the middle of the turn, at the stage in the race where I needed to really accelerate. I tried to explode around the curve. Instead my leg exploded. A sharp pain crept up my thigh, as if someone was dragging a needle from the back of my knee to my buttock. Then, suddenly, I felt a ball build up in the back of the thigh. An instant later, the ball burst. I screamed. The sensation was so painful and so jarring, it lifted me off the ground. I came down and fell face-first onto the track. The other runners were passing me. I reached out and grabbed the red rubber track in front of me with my fingernails and tried to crawl to the finish on my left hip. My mind wasn't processing what had just happened to my leg. I wanted to finish the race so that I could come back the next day and compete again.

Bobby leaped over the stadium railing and ran to me, with Bob Forster right behind, carrying his shoulder bag full of therapist's supplies. Two paramedics brought over a stretcher. I was screaming and crying and trying to crawl. Bobby knelt down beside me and held me down with his hand on my hip to keep me still. He put his other hand to my cheek. “Jackie, it's over. It's over,” he said to me.

He picked me up and placed me onto the stretcher on my back. As they rolled me off the track to the medical area, I covered my face in my hands and continued to sob. Why did this have to happen now? I'd withstood the painful ankle and won the long jump. I was trying to be tough, but my leg had let me down. I was so disappointed.

I was also in a great deal of pain. In the first-aid shelter, it hurt every time Bob and the doctors touched any part of my leg. I thought the hamstring was torn. A big, dark red spot had already appeared on the back of my leg, which was swelling by the minute. The spot was the bruise mark where the muscle had pulled and the blood had seeped out of the end of the frayed tissues and fibers. Bob hurriedly packed the leg in ice and wrapped it with an Ace bandage to prevent further swelling, then I was wheeled out of the stadium on the stretcher, surrounded by photographers, cameras and reporters. An official ordered the medics to move the stretcher from the entrance, where we'd stopped so that I could answer the reporters' questions. I tried to talk through my tears as I replayed the events. Meanwhile, the camera lights nearly blinded me in the dark Tokyo night.

Soon the cab showed up to take me to the hospital. When the paramedics rolled the stretcher off the curb, the wheels banged onto the street, jarring my leg. I winced. The cab driver, Bobby and Bob waited while I answered the last question. Then they lifted me off the stretcher and loaded me into the back seat. My Worlds had just come to a painful end.

The physical rehabilitation of the hamstring was routine. After a couple of days, I was walking. Six weeks later, I was running at full speed.

The emotional rehab was more complicated, though. The injury had been more traumatic than I realized. I found myself flashing back to the moment of injury in Tokyo each time I reached that point on the track during practice. In the middle of a sprint, I'd literally slow down at the spot the muscle had yanked, terrified that it would happen again. I thought I actually felt my leg tighten. But it was all in my head. “I don't know why this is happening,” I told Bobby after one flashback.

“It's okay, it's all part of the healing process,” he said.

He asked Alice Brown, my former training partner, an expert curve runner and silver medalist in the 100 meters in 1984, to teach me to negotiate the turn properly. “I want her to have confidence, instead of fear as she approaches that curve,” he told her.

Before I worked with Alice, I was like a car out of control coming around there, entering it at too fast a speed and hugging the left edge too tightly. Alice moved me to the center of the lane. From there, she said I could run as fast as I wanted, with better control.

The end-of-the-year rankings by
Track & Field News
disappointed me once again. I'd looked forward to being number one in the heptathlon and the long jump and possibly being Female Athlete of the Year. I had the top score in the heptathlon internationally. But because I got injured and withdrew from the World Championships, the magazine ranked me second in the event, behind Sabine Braun of West Germany, who'd won the world tide. Ditto the long jump. I had the longest jump in the world that year and also won the World Championship. But I was placed second to Heike. The editors said I hadn't competed in enough events to earn the top spot. I didn't begrudge the other athletes their awards, particularly not Heike, but I couldn't suppress the feeling that the editors already had other athletes in mind and were forced to come up with excuses to rank them ahead of me.

I tried not to, but I took the slights personally. The more I gave, the more they withheld. Telling me those performances weren't good enough made me feel as if I wasn't good enough. But I gamely tried to take it in stride and wait for brighter, happier days.

Bobby gave me a reason to smile early in 1992. I never had birthday parties growing up. But he always gave me a nice present and made a fuss. Uncharacteristically, when my thirtieth birthday arrived on March 3, 1992, he said nothing and gave me nothing. We spent all day at the track without the subject coming up. I was disappointed. But I tried to hide it.

On the way home from the UCLA track, Bobby went through Beverly Hills for some strange reason, instead of heading for the freeway. Then his pager went off. He pulled into a restaurant parking lot and went in to use the phone. He came out and said Della was calling from St. Louis and wanted to talk to me. “Somebody stole your car from the house,” he said casually.

“What?” I flung open the door and ran inside.

I spotted the phone and dashed toward it, past a big room filled with people. I got to the phone, turned around and they were all staring at me. Suddenly I realized they were all of our friends. They yelled, “
Surprise!
”

I pride myself on not letting anything get past me. But Bobby pulled this surprise party off without my having the slightest notion. I was really happy he had. It was a much-needed boost to my flagging spirits.

We always arrived in Europe at least two weeks before a meet to give our bodies time to experience jet lag and recover from it. In the midst of packing and traveling to Barcelona for the 1992 Games, I contracted a cold. Then, an asthma attack hit. Both Bobby and my inhaler were nearby and I was able to quickly get it under control. After a visit to the hospital, the doctor prescribed an antibiotic for the cold, which we scrambled to find. I didn't dare go near prednisone. It was just ten days before the start of the heptathlon competition and I didn't want any drug test complications.

To pass the time and motivate us, Bobby took Gail and me to a bullfight. The outdoor arena surrounding the bullfighting ring was beautifully rustic. While Bobby rattled off the gory details of what the contestants had done to the bulls, I tried not to listen, focusing instead on how cute the matador's costumes were. To Gail and me, it seemed so barbaric. Exciting, but barbaric.