Atlanta, she was, at the age of fourteen, on the
bronze-medal-winning U.S. gymnastics team at the
Barcelona Olympics in 1992. Strug was originally
trained by the legendary Romanian American coach
Bela Karolyi (for which training Strug left her family
home to move to Houston), but Strug’s career un-
derwent a period of turmoil after Karolyi’s tempo-
rary retirement from coaching after the Barcelona
Olympics. After going through a series of trainers
and gyms, injuring her back in the U.S. Classic
competition in Palm Springs, California, in 1994,
and overcoming eating disorders, Strug made the
1996 Olympic team in her sport, a seven-member
group that also included Amanda Borden, Shannon
Miller, Dominique Dawes, Jaycie Phelps, Dominique
Moceanu, and Amy Chow—later to be known as the
“Magnificent Seven.”
At the 1996 Atlanta Games at the Georgia Dome,
on the final day of team competition, the U.S.
women’s gymnastics team competed with the Rus-
sians for the gold. Strug, the last of the Magnificent
Seven to compete, fell on her first vault, spraining
her ankle. She persisted through pain to attempt her
second vault, which she landed before collapsing to
the floor in pain. Her 9.712 score won the gold
medal for the United States, the first ever for the
U.S. women’s gymnastics team.
Strug’s triumph was perhaps the most memora-
ble American athletic achievement at the 1996
Olympics and decisively differentiated the tone of
the Atlanta Games from the previous Olympics
staged on American soil, the 1984 Olympics in
Los Angeles. Whereas the 1984 Games, staged at
the height of Cold War tensions and boycotted by
Soviet-bloc athletes, was full of a robust American
patriotism, the 1996 Games had a more ecumenical,
less insistently nationalistic or chauvinistic feel—
epitomized by the ailing boxer Muhammad Ali be-
ing the final carrier of the Olympic torch. With
Strug’s achievement, the 1996 Olympics were a rat-
ings success for the National Broadcasting Company
(NBC) and helped capture the key demographic of
female viewers.
At the time of the victory of the Magnificent
Seven in Atlanta, commentators predicted that gym-
nastics would be in the national spotlight for years to
come. However, as with so many pop culture phe-
nomena of the 1990’s, the media glare faded after a
short while, and women’s gymnastics receded to a
comparatively low point of media exposure for the
remainder of the decade.Impact That a young woman was the face of the
1996 Olympic Games signaled the increasingly
prominent role played by young women in 1990’s
popular culture, as opposed to the masculinist ethos
of the 1980’s. That Strug was part of a team, an en-
semble, and not just an individual athlete striving for
medals, also differentiated mutuality and commu-
nity over a win-at-all-costs striving.Further Reading
Kleinbaum, N. H.The Magnificent Seven: The Autho-
rized Stor y of American Gold. New York: Bantam
Books, 1996.
Senn, Alfred Erich.Power, Politics, and the Olympic
Games.Champaign, Ill.: Human Kinetics, 1999.The Nineties in America Strug, Kerri 819
Kerri Strug is carried by her coach, Bela Karolyi, during the
awards ceremony in the women’s team gymnastics competition at
the Summer Olympics in Atlanta on July 23, 1996. The U.S.
women’s team won the gold.(AP/Wide World Photos)