West Virginia’s Greatest Athlete
State history
The American state of West Virginia is blessed with great natural beauty — it can be called the land of America’s mountains — but also extraordinary individuals like Pearl S. Buck — a synophile who received the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in the late 1930s, becoming one of the first women on Earth to earn that distinction — and Mary Lou Retton, widely regarded as one of the greatest gymnasts of all time, along with with Nadia Comaneci from Romania and Olga Korbut from the Soviet Union, what is now the Russian Federation. Miss Retton lost the 1983 World Cup in Hungary, but managed to become an Olympic champion in 1984. During a four-year athletic career from 1982 to 1985, she won more than ten international and national championships.
Towards the end of the 1920s, women began to compete in gymnastics at the Games of the IX Olympiad in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but the United States of America did not perform well until August 1984 when Miss Retton surprised the Planet after winning five medals. in the Gymnastics Tournament of the XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles (CA), during a duel with the Romanian Ecaterina Szabo, the great favorite in the Summer Olympic Games. It was the beginning of a new era for American gymnastics.
A hardworking person
Born in Fairmont (WV) on January 24, 1968, she briefly attended upper secondary school in her hometown. In the late 1970s, Mary Lou Retton discovered her passion for gymnastics when she admired Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci (the two have some things in common), one of the greatest athletes in the history of the Summer Olympics. A short time later, she began taking gymnastics lessons.
After becoming a hardworking person, Retton left Fairmont for Houston, Texas, beginning to build her reputation as one of America’s most respected athletes. There he trained under the direction of Bela Karolyi, a former scout for Romania’s Olympic gymnastics squad during the Marxist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Bela contributed significantly to Romania’s sporting success on the world stage. In 1981, however, he and his wife Marta sought political asylum in the United States. Since then, Karolyi’s family has won several trophies with the American squad.
At the age of fifteen, Miss Retton was on her way to a great international career. Thus, she left Texas to enter the international circuit at a time when her country was defeated by Eastern Europe and Japan in women’s gymnastics competitions. Faced with a vigorous schedule in the 1970s, the United States women’s squad fared poorly in world competitions. At that time, with the relaxation of some restrictions between the United States and the Iron Curtain, the United States, more than 30 states, had the opportunity to see some of the best gymnasts in Eastern Europe. In early 1976, Karolyi and her compatriots, including Comaneci, made a trip to five American states, including New Mexico, New York, and Arizona. Earlier, in March 1973, Olga Korbut – who once said “America is different than I expected. I like it” – and her fellow athletes left Moscow for the United States to promote the sport.
Greatest: Mary Lou Retton
In 1983, Miss Retton already possessed a virtuous technique, but was unable to compete in the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Budapest due to injury. However, there were surprising results in the following months. In less than a year, she was considered by many to be the best female gymnast in the United States.
With her prodigious technical skills and high quality of performance, Miss Retton surprisingly received a gold medal at the American Cup, impressing sports journalists and sportscasters, an event that had been won by Comaneci in 1976, in the pre-Olympic year of 1983. There, he began to outshine his teammates. However, media interest in Retton intensified when he returned from the US Olympic trials, with other good news: He qualified for the upcoming Summer Games, his first and last Olympic participation. On the trip to the Los Angeles Olympics and beyond, he won the National Championship by winning the 1984 American Cup for the second time in a row.
While the Soviet bloc, from Cuba and Laos to the USSR and Bulgaria, boycotted the 1984 Games, Romania and Yugoslavia, now Serbia, were the only communist countries to compete in California. Because of this, the Romanian Olympic gymnastics team participated with its world stars; The team’s roster included top-tier athletes such as Ecaterina Szabo, Simona Pauca, Laura Cutina, Lavina Agache, Cristina Elena Grigoras, and Mihaela Stanulet. In the 1970s and 1980s, Romania had become the leading force in Olympic gymnastics, having defeated the Soviet team at the 1976 Olympiad with Miss Comaneci, one of Retton’s early models. At the 1983 World Championship in Hungary, the Romanian team had captured seven medals (1 gold, 2 silver, 4 bronze).
At the XXIII Olympiad, the United States of America featured one of its most outstanding women’s teams in gymnastics history, comprised of four outstanding athletes (Retton, Julianne McNamara, Tracee Talavera, and Katty Johnson). At the Gymnastics Championships at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles, the youngest Mary Lou Retton, for example, rose to the top by becoming the first non-Eastern European to win an Olympic title in the women’s category, following a victory over Ecaterina. Szabo. During the event, he stole the show and the hearts of the audience. The overall gold medal winner is often seen as the “Queen of the Summer Games”, as was the case with Vera Caslavska in 1968 and Comaneci in 1976, respectively.
At the multisport event, the all-rounder Retton also had the distinction of being the first American gymnast – male female – to win a gold medal since the early 1930s. In addition to capturing the Olympic title, this West Virginia daughter added four more medals to reinforce her credentials as one of the best athletes in the world since 1900, when female athletes were allowed to participate in the Olympiad. Miss Retton won two silver medals for the team competition (with 391, 20 points and after defeating China) and jumping (19,850 points) and two bronzes in individual competition in the bars (19,800 points) and floor exercise (19,775 ). Since then, the XXIII Olympiad has made Retton an internationally known figure, gaining a following around the world, including American leader Ronald Reagan.
Chosen for the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame
Following her triumph in California, Retton was a red-carpet guest of President Ronald Reagan at the White House, beginning a lasting friendship with the American leader and close ties with the Republican Party. But there were also other honors. For providing the most memorable image of the United States’ Olympic victory, Sports Illustrated named her “Sportsman of the Year” in late 1984. Also, a park in her hometown was named in her honor.
American fans were devastated when Miss Retton announced her retirement in 1985. Unlike Nadia Comaneci – who had more than eight years of gymnastics experience – and Olga Korbut, she made the decision to leave the sport at the peak of an amazing career. . During her time away from gymnastics, she has become a television analyst.
Despite her brief four-year Olympic career, her legacy as one of the greatest gymnasts of the 20th century remains in America’s sports system. A few weeks after Retton’s victory, gymnastics events began to flourish in the United States with thousands of participants in schools, academies, and sports clubs. As of 1984, the US women’s team has won 24 Olympic medals (5 gold, 12 silver, 7 bronze) with many world-class gymnasts such as Carly Rae Patterson (Louisiana), Shaw Johnson (Iowa) and Shannon Miller (Oklahoma). .
In 1997, Mary Lou Retton was inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame.