So you think that Bill Clinton is ambitious? Or that George Bush’s willingness “to do anything” to be re-elected might be a bit over the competitive top? Neither of these guys has anything on a 4-foot-7,16-year-old named Kim Zmeskal, Team U.S.A.’s leading gymnast. When she was 6, her parents signed Kim up with the famed Romanian expatriate Bela Karolyi, who spent a decade impelling her toward today’s nine-hour-a-day practice sessions. True, she gets most Sundays off to spend with her family in Houston, but she’d best not indulge her taste for ice cream. And for all this work, she has won the right to spend a few minutes at the center ofthe sporting world’s attention, hoping to win a thin gold medal before she slips irrevocably past her peak.
To her coach, Zmeskal will always be “The Little Pumpkin.” Just 80 pounds, she’s shaped like a miniature version of former champ Mary Lou Retton. Shape is important here: the classic gymnast has twigs for arms and legs, which are stuck on a trunk no thicker than a Fig Newton. Retton and Zmeskal don’t look like pixies, but what they do in the air would make Tinker Bell envious.
At the 1984 Games, in Los Angeles, Kim watched Mary Lou, another of Karolyi’s charges, execute a perfect vault from the horse to the gold-medal podium, and onto the Wheaties box. “She does remind me of me,” says Retton. “But she just wants to be Kim, not the next Mary Lou.” Zmeskal has already accomplished something her role model never did. When Retton struck gold, the Soviet boycott kept its great gymnasts at home. At the 1991 world championships, in Indianapolis, Zmeskal took on the crumbling Soviet empire’s best and b came the first American ever to win the All-Around competition. The women’s All-Around consists of vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise; medals are also awarded in each of the four events (following stories).
The gymnastics world is as much rough as tumble. There is rampant resentment of Karolyi, a volatile personality whose ego is exceeded only by his string of successes back to Nadia Comaneci. The critics carped at Zmeskal’s world title, suggesting it was a “hometown” win, little more than a sop to the enthusiastic American crowd. No one denies her remarkable athleticism. But the rap on Kim is that she lacks artistry and complexity in her routines. Rival coach Aleksandr Aleksandrov insists Zmeskal’s only skill is executing “midlevel gymnastics” without mistakes. “If Zmeskal were on our team,” says the coach of the former Soviet, now commonwealth, women’s team, “nobody would notice her, I guarantee it.”
Even Kim’s triumph at the 1992 worlds -this time in Paris-in both balance beam and floor exercise (there was no All-Around) didn’t quiet the naysayers. The French bestowed the nickname “Ice Bomb” on the youngster, who lacks Mary Lou’s blinding smile and radiant personality. L’Equipe, the national sports daily, described her as “stiff, blond, chubby … rhythm without any blues, power without spleen.” Aleksandrov remains singularly disdainful, sneering that Zmeskal doesn’t even resemble a gymnast. “After all,” he says, “a gymnast must be presented so that she will be beautiful.”
Kim doesn’t try to be a tumbling Barbie. She’s an ordinary-looking child any parent would be proud to call cute; her standard ponytail makes no concession to style. But she certainly showed a kind of spleen after former world champ Svetlana Boginskaya refused to shake hands following a recent competition. “I hate her,” Zmeskal confessed to Le Gymnaste magazine. “She’s too old … It’s over for her now.” But that competitiveness, that mental toughness, may be what sets her apart. “That is more important than any technical hocus-pocus [to) momentarily impress a small number of people,” says Karolyi, who frets constantly about the “biasness” of judges. As far as he’s concerned, the cold war lives on in the hearts of gymnastics judges everywhere.
Barcelona is Kim’s one shot at Olympic glory. Her sport does not favor women’s bodies. At the recent U.S. Olympic trials in Baltimore, Kim was older than two thirds of her rivals. (The “too old” Boginskaya is a creaky 19.) “It’s hard to keep up with the younger people coming up,” says Kim. It’s also hard to sustain the level of sacrifice that the sport and Karolyi demand. But the greatest fear, says Zmeskal’s mother, Clarice, is that injury or a single misstep could mean “all your work for the last 10 years just goes down the tube.”
Until the U.S. trials last month, Zmeskal had feared the Europeans most: Boginskaya and her Ukrainian teammate Tatyana Gutsu, and Hungary’s star Henrietta Onodi. In Baltimore, however, 15-year-old Shannon Miller established herself as a waif to be reckoned with. Having recovered from a dislocated left elbow, the 69-pound gymnast from Oklahoma City took first place. (Because of the complicated scoring system, Zmeskal had more points yet still came in second.) “It’s not between me and Kim,” insists Miller. “It’s whether I can do the best routine I can, whether I hit them or not.” That’s true, but Mary Lou Retton, for one, thinks this is still Zmeskal’s year. “Kim is so obviously a champion,” says Retton. “I expect unbelievable things from her in Barcelona.” About, that is, as much as Kim expects from herself And if she wins-and even if she doesn’t-would someone please buy this kid an ice-cream cone?
