SPORTS | Striving for excellence
26 March 2008
Bart Conner Recalls Olympic Joy of “Just Being There”
Gymnast made U.S. team despite injury, “advanced” age of 26
Gymnast Bart Conner earned spots on U.S. Olympic teams in 1976, 1980, and 1984. He won two gold medals in 1984: an individual medal on the parallel bars and a medal for the all-around team competition.
The following article is taken from the U.S. Department of State eJournal USA, “The Olympic Experience.”
(begin byliner)
The Crowd Lifted Us Up
By Bart Conner
When I was just about nine or ten years old, I could hold a headstand for five minutes, and I could kick up against the wall and go into a handstand. If I wanted to go from the living room to my bedroom, it became a challenge to see if I could make it there walking on my hands.
Then we had 13 wooden steps down into the basement. Most parents would say, “Oh, my gosh, you’re going to break your neck!” My mom wasn’t exactly happy that I was trying it, but she knew this was something I was excited about, so she said, “Just make sure you put a bunch of mattresses and pillows at the bottom of the stairs in case you crash.” So we did that, and I practiced walking down the stairs on my hands.
At school, when we did gymnastics in physical education, the teacher, a guy named Les Lange, said, “You really are good at this. You want to see what gymnastics is all about?”
So he took me over to the high school, where they had a pretty good program. We went into the gym, and I just thought it was so cool. There were rings, bars, trampolines, things to swing from and jump off of. Mr. Lange lifted me up to the parallel bars. I swung a few times, and I went up into a handstand, the first time I was ever on the parallel bars. To me, it seemed a lot less dangerous than walking down the stairs on my hands.
That was the “Aha” moment for me, when I realized, “I want to be a gymnast.”
I was small, I was strong. I could walk on my hands. I could do a back flip in the backyard. It gave me confidence because I could do nifty tricks my friends couldn’t do.
By the time I reached the eighth grade, prior to getting into high school, I was the Junior Olympic National Champion. I was 14.
I had a lot of international opportunities. My first international meet was in Montreal in 1975, so I was 17. I was getting a lot of fun benefits from my work in gymnastics.
When I was 18, I made the 1976 Olympic team. We came in seventh as a team, and I was something like 46th place in the all-around. But by 1979, I was world champion. In 1980, I was bound for the Olympic Games in Moscow, but that was the Olympics the United States boycotted [in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan].
My last Olympics was 1984 in Los Angeles. I was 26 by then -- which is ancient for a male gymnast.
Seven months before, at an international meet in Japan, I tore my biceps competing on the rings. I jumped off the rings, and I was immediately thinking, “This is a defining moment in my career. This might put me out of the Olympics. I might be done right now.” Here I was at an advanced age, and a serious injury at a late stage usually means “game over.” An odd sensation came over me, and I thought, “I am going to make that Olympic team in 1984. I am going to march into that stadium.”
I visualized myself entering the stadium, waving to the crowd, and I could hear the sports announcer saying, “Hey, folks, here comes the American men’s team. Seven months ago I never would have believed this, but guess what? Bart Conner is on that team.” I planned that out in my mind. There I was with an ice bag on my arm, trying to get to the airport in Tokyo to return to the United States for surgery, and I already visualized how I wanted that scene to play out.
So when I actually marched in the opening ceremonies in 1984, it was pretty emotional for me. There were a lot of reasons why I shouldn’t have been there, but I was.
Distinctly, I remember walking into the L.A. Coliseum. There were, I don’t know, 80 to 90 thousand people, just a sea of people. We marched in to hear this enormous roar from the crowd. I was walking next to my teammate Jim Hartung, who had been one of my rivals since we were 10 years old. I said to Jim, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could find our parents?” And Jim says, “Hey, look, there’s your mom.” There was a section of parents of U.S. Olympians, and Jim noticed a bunch of people waving American flags, and he spotted my mom.
I remember a sense of calm when we saw our parents. After all these years of work, we were enjoying the moment of just being there. I didn’t know what was going to happen over the next two weeks, but I had made it. To share that moment, that very instant, with my family was pretty powerful. They’re waving at me, I’m waving at them, and there’s this sense, “Look what we did together.” There was an enormous sense of pride.
We got into that meet and felt this tremendous support. It was like the crowd lifted us up, like we could do no wrong.
In gymnastics when you put a punctuation mark on a performance, you “stick” the landing or the dismount. We were just sticking dismounts, right and left, even beyond what we thought we could do. I saw a video from that event the other day. I did a high bar dismount, and I just completely drilled it. I looked up, and the camera caught this look on my face that said, “Wow! Can you believe that one? I rarely stick this thing, and I drilled it that time.”
A lot of things happen at the Olympics that are beyond your control. In order to be lucky enough to win something, the stars and the planets have to line up, but there is a definite advantage to being in an Olympics in your home country because of what you get from the crowd. We were pulled along in this wave of enthusiasm and support from that hometown crowd.
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