Every Summer Games, at least since Roone Arledge redesigned them, with personalities instead of competitors, television must give America its new Olympic heroine. That first week, we must have the kid–Our Girl. She needs to be good, of course; she has to be a winner. But better she be bubbly than be best. Who remembers now that it was not Olga Korbut who won the All-Around in ‘72, or that another woman swimmer won twice as many medals as Janet Evans did in ‘88? Nobody, of course. Nobody remembers. Because Olga was Our Girl and Janet was Our Girl, and that other stuff doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t even matter where in the world Our Girl comes from; she only has to captivate us.
There are, of course, also always grown women at the Olympics. Champs. From Babe Didriksen to Wilma Rudolph, from Fanny Blankers-Koen to Flo Jo. But they are merely gold medalists, record-setters, admired no more than their strapping male equivalents-not loved and cuddled the way TV leads us to embrace Our Girls. Mary Lou Retton went on the Wheaties box, Nadia Comaneci into our hearts. Why, it didn’t even matter the slightest to us that Nadia and Olga were Commies. It’s hype, of course, and we happily buy it. Above all, you see, Our Girls hark our memories back to what we yet yearn for the Olympics to be: ever young and warm and innocent, games, happy world picnics where everybody cheers, peace reigns and nothing is complicated. Our Girls aren’t victory; they’re better than that: they’re hope.
In ‘92, the one in all the world with the best chance to be Our Girl is Summer Sanders from Roseville, Calif.
Summer from Roseville is 19, tall, lithesome and just finished up her sophomore year at Stanford, the Duke of the West, because in high school she was an A student as well as a national swim sensation. Summer is wearing an NBA cap that Adam Keefe, Stanford’s basketball star, gave her just before he was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks. And Summer is explaining that she got her name because when Bob and Barbara Sanders had their first child it was due June 21, so they thought
Summer would be a terrific name for a girl. In fact, they thought it would be so terrific that when it was a summer boy they named him Trevor, but they saved Summer for a girl someday, even when the girl was born two years later and the someday came in October. “My middle name is Elisabeth,” Summer goes on. “With an S. My mother was S crazy then. People always say: ‘Summer? Oh, were your parents hippies?‘Or,‘Oh, are you from California?’ Or, ‘Is your brother named Winter?’” Summer wrinkles her nose. “Oh yeah, sure. Try again.”
Summer has long brown hair and matching brown eyes. It is a good thing she isn’t blond, like her brother, Trevor, is, because since half of the conscious world grew up with the Beach Boys and the other half are currently in the thrall of Fox TV, then everybody would be carrying on about how she’s a classic “California girl,” as though they were turned out in limited editions by Hasbro. In fact, Summer hardly even comes from California, inasmuch as Roseville is found north of Sacramento in that huge expanse of Oregon Minor.
And more important, whatever we are advised that “California girls” are supposed to be like, Summer from Roseville is fresh and sweet and honest and absolutely guileless. She never reads anything written about her. “Why should I?” she asked her father. “I already know what the truth is about me.” A few weeks ago, when she asked him to look into a duffel bag for a pair of her sneakers, Mr. Sanders found Summer’s ribbons from the Olympic trials all wadded up around the medals, jammed down, forgotten, in the bottom of the bag under a bunch of junk.
These trifling bric-a-brac are merely national awards for the 100-meter butterfly and the 200; and the 200-meter individual medley and the 400. Sanders is only the third American woman Olympian ever to qualify for four individual swimming events-and she also has a chance to swim on the 400-meter medley relay team. She agrees this is something to be proud of, but it likewise annoys her because it means she has races Sunday and therefore she won’t be able to march in the opening ceremonies the day before.
“I look back sometimes and wish I’d played soccer and volleyball,” she says. Briefly, in puberty, Summer concentrated on cheerleading instead of swimming. “I don’t know if I can keep on going through all this again. I’ll tell you, after I’m through with the 400 IM, and I mean, I do hope I swim it twice more because that means I get to the final, and, I mean, yeah, I want to win, but I can actually say, I really hate that race. I hate it. I’m just a normal girl. I’m not like those gymnasts who move away from home and everything.” She likes to dance and water-ski and watch “All My Children” and hang out, and she broke up with her first real boyfriend a little while ago.
Still, Sanders is more sophisticated than all of TV’s Our Girls who have preceded her. She’s left Stanford for a semester and signed with an agent, Advantage International, thereby forfeiting her collegiate eligibility. The trouble with being an Our Girl is that the specimen is most like those insufferable little cutesy-poo Olympic mascots-beavers and raccoons and cats and tykes and such-that are everywhere during their appointed games but are then retired forever, instantly, with the closing ceremonies. Like these mascots, Our Girls are not supposed to come back when they grow up and become women. Olga was a doddering 21-year-old when she returned to compete in the ‘76 Games, and so she was widely depicted as the vengeful older woman to Nadia’s sugarplum. Swimming people don’t know quite what to make of the elderly Janet Evans, 20, now that her Olympics has passed, but here she still is, still ticking.
Evans’s experience is the particular model that has encouraged the Sanders family to make hay. The darling of Seoul, Our Girl ‘88 was a high-school senior then. However, by Evans’s sophomore year in college, she was already 19 and fading fast, even if, gamely, she did make the U.S. team with times far slower than those of her salad days.
There are two general explanations to account for the firefly existence of female swimmers. First, the physiological: swimming authorities refer, in Victorian terms, to how a young woman’s “center of gravity” changes as she matures. But second, as that center shifts with the curves, so, too, do a woman’s interests expand. Mary T. Meagher, the finest butterflyer of all time, says: “Outside my body, there were just so many more changes. I wasn’t surprised to see how difficult swimming suddenly became for the East German girls as soon as the wall went down.”
Only a single American woman has ever been able to repeat as a gold-medalist swimmer, and that was in the 1920s. Of course, Mary T. would surely have won her first golds in 1980 had President Carter not fired one for effect, using Olympic athletes as ammunition. As it was, four years later, when Bob Sanders drove little Summer down from Roseville to see the swimming at the L.A. Games, they watched Mary T. win her only golds. But even as Meagher dominated her event for years, even her times grew slower. She never approached the world records that she set when she was 16, before her own wall came down. As hard as Sanders works out, too, her dedication doesn’t even approach what the stalwart Meagher was renowned for. And so, even as Summer stands at the peak of her sport, she and everybody around her sense that her autumn years are in sight.
Sanders’s finale is probably hastened all the more because the butterfly is so especially demanding. “To start with, you must have the rhythm,” Meagher says. “I really don’t think anyone can teach the fly. And then, you have to use so many muscles, all up in the arms, in the stomach.” The flyer must be instinctively synchronized as well –“Summer has perfect balance,” says her Stanford coach, Richard Quick-sweeping the arms together in great, ferocious circles, while the lower body undulates, flopping, finlike.
The butterfly is something of a mutant stroke, anyway, a faster alternative to the ancient breaststroke; it first appeared to horrify shocked American officials in 1933. But the butterfly did conform to the existing breaststroke rules. And it was faster-even if it did seem like a vulgar, raging passion in contrast to the breaststroke’s dainty caress. Finally, in the ’50s, the fly was officially made an event on its own.
From the first, America’s current world champion fly queen took to the water, a natural almost from the moment her father, a dentist, installed a backyard pool. “I was lucky,” Summer says. “Like, suppose my father had put in a tennis court instead. I can’t play tennis at all. I’d be in some retarded league now instead of going to the Olympics.”
She possesses the innate ability to, in effect, grab the water and use it to propel herself forward, as she would pull herself up by the rungs of a ladder. She also owns the capacity, as her childhood coach, Mike Hastings, says, “to find the holes in the water”-to guide her supple body through the diminished liquid resistance she has already broken with her hands. “Has anybody ever looked so light in the water?” Mary T. asks.
And, if it is possible, temperamentally, Sanders is even more breezy–one of those rare athletes capable of extreme concentration when it is called for, total relaxation otherwise. In her last international meet before the Olympics, at the Santa Clara Swim Club, Summer ate a deli sandwich for lunch, then went to her father’s motel suite, where she immediately fell asleep, sprawled across his bed, while a bunch of friends drank beer and watched TV in the living room, hollering and carrying on. She had to be woken from a sound sleep to go swim. In a sport where fractions of split seconds matter, where the water is always 78 degrees and swimmers shave their body hair to save a millisecond, Sanders will not cut her long hair, even though she knows that, balled up in her cap, her lovely tresses may cost her a race. Sometimes she wears bracelets and a wristwatch when she races. “You know how Summer psychs herself?” Trevor asks. “She psychs herself up by smiling.”
In fact, unlike all the people around her, Summer from Roseville seems terribly blase about the Olympics themselves. Hey, Summer-great race! How do you feel? “Well, actually, I thought I was going to have to blow chunks that last 25 meters.” Sure, she’s qualified in four individual events, but she knows she’s no lock in any of them, and the clear favorite in only one, the 200 fly. Besides, by luck, her best races are scheduled last, and so by the time Summer from Roseville finally gets to shine, it may be too late. Somebody like Kim Zmeskal, the tiny gymnast, may already be Our Girl.
If these possibilities concern Sanders, it is not apparent. She just lets Trevor do her worrying for her. They are exceptionally close for a brother and sister, “best friends.” When their parents were divorced, when Summer was 8 and he was 10, it was agreed that the two children would move together every six months between Bob and Barbara. Now, it was hardly Hansel and Gretel, for goodness’ sake. Summer and Trevor love both their parents, always have, and Barbara and Bob lived only a mile or so apart then. Still, the arrangement bound the two siblings uncommonly, because however their world changed around them, Summer was the one constant for Trevor and Trevor for Summer.
Eventually, at Cal Poly, where he’s a senior now, Trevor took up swimming again himself so that he could better understand his sister. “People are always asking me: ‘Aren’t you jealous of your sister?’ Jealous?” Trevor cries. “I could talk to you all day about Summer. Forget swimming. She’s so unique in so many ways. My sister is just one awesome person.”
Intertwined so with him, Summer has even seen her brother formed with her success. At 22, Trevor’s her road manager; he has a job working for NBC in Barcelona, and Advantage International has taken him on as an intern. There are natural swimmers, but maybe they’d never have found out if Dad didn’t put a pool in; and maybe there are even natural agents, but they’d never have found out if Sis wasn’t an athlete. “I’m not much of a religious person,” she says, “but I do believe everybody has a destiny, and I wonder what else is planned for me. I’m not finished, you know. I want to be successful at something other than swimming.”
Just before she left a team-training session in Arizona a few weeks ago, she found a letter that her roommate, a freestyler named Nicole Haislett, had left for her. Summer assumed it was just a friendly goodbye note, but the letter from Haislett turned out to be much more serious. It talked about how lucky the two of them were, to have had the chances they had been given, and to have accomplished so much so young-that all their sacrifices of teenage delights for the hard work of a spartan sport had been validated, because whatever happened in Barcelona, they had won already. “It was so inspirational,” Sanders says. “It was awesome. I totally had the chills.”
She is taking the letter to Barcelona, when all the world will be looking on, when we choose one pretty young athlete and invest her with all we want to believe about the Olympics, about sports, about fun and games-and about youth and beauty, too, in a world that is so often old and ugly. She’s the smile that psychs us up, and if Summer from Roseville is the one to be Our Girl this Olympics, fine, it’s good to know she’s already her own person, too.
Summer Sanders will swim in both individual medleys–the 200-meter and 400-meter–and may have a spot on the 4X100 medley relay team, too. The individual medley is the swimming equivalent of the decatholon, essentially four events crammed into one. (The four competitive swimming strokes; Olympic record: 200-meter, 2:12.59; 400-meter, 4:36.29) (BLUMRICH–NEWSWEEK)
