Sheila Taormina, who at age 39 became the first woman to compete in three different sports at the Olympics, wrapped up an amazing career by placing 19th of 36 entrants at the modern pentathlon at the Beijing Olympics Friday.
This simple statement of the planned final fact in her athletic career does her no justice.
This amazing athlete previously earned a gold medal in the women’s 4x200 meter freestyle relay swim at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta – at the age of 27. Then, from the age of 31 to 35, she took up triathlon from scratch, appearing in two Olympics, rising to second in world rankings and winning the 2004 International Triathlon Union World Championship. Then, at the age of 36, she tried and rejected the classic winter sport of cross country skiing-and-rifle shooting biathlon before finding a third Olympic home in modern pentathlon. In the next three years, Taormina rose from stark beginner to Olympic level in the intricacies of shooting, fencing and equestrian to accompany her world class swimming and running.
In fact, if you added up all her sporting disciplines, it adds up to six – swimming, cycling, running, fencing, shooting and jumping high-strung, 1,200-pound horses over obstacles just a little shorter than her fearless, 5-foot 4-inch frame.
Looking at her simple Olympic placing in the sport invented by modern Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin to test the mettle of classic military disciplines, you might not be aware of how amazing her performance was in a sport she started from scratch just three years ago.
Let's start with the bad news.
After a par-for-Taormina 172 of 200 in the 10-meter air pistol which earned her 1012 points, Taormina placed a miserable dead last of 36 competitors in fencing -- a series of one touch epee battles that gives aggressive chance-takers a puncher’s chance. While Taormina’s world-class reaction time was a good fit for this Errol Flynn-Douglas Fairbanks activity, her short stature and short arms marked her for target practice against the best in the sport who are blessed with mighty wingspans and deadly lunges for what boxers might call jabs. While she had scored a Pan American overall championship and amassed a score that would have won the first women’s Olympic modern pentathlon in her very first competitive outing, Taormina’s 4 wins and 31 losses in this Olympic round robin left her an unsalvageable 576 points behind eventual winner Lena Schonenborn of Germany. At her best in international World Cup contests, Taormina had managed a score of roughly 750 points, which would have placed her 7th overall.
The feisty, wonderfully competitive Taormina did not take affront to her pride lightly. In a wonderful story in the Detroit Free Press, writer Michael Rosenberg quotes home town heroine Taormina (Livonia is a suburb of Detroit): “During the fence, I could barely stay in my own skin,” said Taormina. “If you had told me that I would only have four victories, I would have said ‘That’s impossible. Nobody could do that poorly.’ I would say about five of the bouts I was like ‘Screw it. I’m just running at her! That’s not smart. And that didn't work.”
At that point, the emotionally volatile Taormina had her Olympic moment of doubt. As reported by Rosenberg, she waved her sister Sudee over and told her “I can’t do it. I gotta walk off.” Sudee then reminded Taormina of her Christian faith and said she could not quit. Sheila then told her sister she was “an angel from God” and strode off to give it her best.
Now for the good news.
Taormina then went to the pool and set an Olympic women’s modern pentathlon record in the 200 meters of 2 minutes 8.56 seconds and scored a record 1376 points – 28 points and three seconds better than the next best swimmer, 9th overall Amelie Caze of France, and 96 points and 8 seconds better than gold medalist Schonenborn.
Then, in arguably her greatest overachieving moment in sports, Taormina, the ultimate blue collar athlete, dressed up in the riding gear that is the symbol of the sport of the privileged class and rode a perfect 1,200 point masterpiece matched only by two other riders with a lifetime of experience. Five riders crashed heavily into immovable wooden barriers that topped out at four feet high and fell injured and bleeding. Gold medalist Schonenborn gave up 28 points when her horse ticked a barrier, Taormina garnered appreciative ooohs and aahs from the knowledgeable crowd.
In the run finale, this classically inspired, archaic sport designed to emulate the disciplines that might be required of 19th century military couriers, and contended in the 1912 Olympics by famed US World War II General-to-be George S. Patton Jr., lost a little of its classical luster in a run course laid out like a church Easter picnic maze. With all its sharp zig-zag turns, Taormina took things a little conservatively on her 39-year-old knees and lost a little of her straight-line firepower. Nonetheless, she ran a 7th fastest 10:25.05 for the 3000 meters, earning 1220 points, and notably finishing two places and 3 seconds ahead of the gold medalist.
With no conspiratorial urging from Taormina, this author wonders what would have happened if Taormina were competing in a modern quadrathlon -- minus the fencing. A check of the final standings reveals that second place finisher Heather Fell of Great Britain would have exchanged her silver for the gold – and Taormina would have earned the silver.
While woulda-coulda-shoulda rationalizations play no part of Taormina’s no-excuses philosophy, then-Lieutenant Patton was not too proud to grouse about the judging and claim he was robbed. As written in David Wallechinsky’s The Complete Book of the Olympics, Patton loudly asserted he was penalized severely for missing one target completely when in fact one of his shots went through a previously-made hole. If he had been able to make his case, he would have won gold. However, under modern drug testing, he would have been disqualified because he received an injection of opium before the cross country run.
The ambivalent emotional aftermath to her magnificent athletic journey
What did it all mean, Taormina’s odyssey from a heavily spotlighted, main-event Olympic sport of swimming, to the brash newcomer triathlon, to her immersion in an archaic sport fully understood only by its military archdruids? In fact, the new wave of hip new sports like BMX argue that shoot-fence-swim-ride-run is an antiquated anachronism, expensive and has such a limited, old-fashioned audience that it should fade away like all old soldiers. Ironically, when Les McDonald was arguing for triathlon’s inclusion, the first response from the IOC’s stuffed suits was that triathlon’s best strategy was to attach itself as a sub-category of modern pentathlon. In retrospect, modern pentathlon might have wished it had attached itself to the booming popularity of triathlon. Except for one salient fact: Modern pentathlon was the brainchild and pet sport of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the revived modern Olympic Games. And despite the influence of ratings hungry NBC, the old Baron still carries weight.
While the power of Taormina’s journey is really contained in the personal hurdles she overcame, her objective accomplishments deserve far more respect than they get in the hurly burly accorded far more famous and notorious competitors among Beijing’s 10,500 accredited athletes.
Taormina’s long time coach Lew Kidder correctly points out that the list of athletes who have risen to world championship levels in more than one sport is a short one. It starts with Jim Thorpe, who won the 1912 Olympic decathlon and achieved All-American status in college football and stardom in pro football. It also includes Babe Didrikson Zaharias, a multiple gold medalist in the 1932 Olympics in track and field and a Hall of Fame career in women’s professional golf. In more modern times, you might include Bob Hayes, Olympic gold medal sprinter who also starred as a wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, and must include the legendary Bo Jackson, who edges out contemporary Deion Sanders because Bo Knows he was an all star in both professional football and baseball. Then you can toss marginal candidates like 5-time Olympic speed skating gold medalist Eric Heiden, who later became an Olympic-level cyclist but never dominated his second sport. And you must simply exclude Michael Jordan, who dominated basketball like a Colossus but stumbled in minor league baseball and has lost boatloads of money betting on his over-par golf game.
While Taormina was not a headline performer in the 1996 Olympic Games, she did earn a gold medal in the 4x200 meter freestyle relay – and that Olympic championship alone makes her eligible for the short list. Sadly missing from most mainstream articles on Taormina’s three-sport Olympic quest was her 2004 World Championship in Triathlon. Most of the lazy, Olympic-centric feature writers left things at her 6th place finish in Sydney and an injury-plagued 23rd in Athens. Their hurried perspectives by omission left their readers with the misleading perception that Taormina was just some middle of the pack record-chasing Olympic junkie. Far from it. When she started triathlon, Taormina was a very amateur cyclist who crashed her brains out twice in her first World Cup. By her 2004 World Championship, Taormina was one of the fastest, most aggressive, most fearless and brilliant handling cyclist in her sport who might have had a rich future in road cycling. In running, she began with enthusiasm as a thrashing 40-minute 10km runner who made her first Olympics on the basis of her swim and bike. She ended up as one of the top five runners in the sport with a PR in the low 34 minute range which would have made her a contender once again in the Beijing Triathlon. While the great scorer wrote a 23rd against her name in Athens, she and Loretta Harrop blazed out to a huge lead by T2. Only a long-term leg injury suffered in May kept her out of the fight for the medals in August.
As for modern pentathlon, Taormina basically ran out of time in the three years she had to go from zero to Olympic modern pentathlete. She did score a silver medal in a modern pentathlon World Cup two years ago, and her progress in the three new disciplines was hindered by various injuries. But all in all, she remained just short of world championship form in her new sport.
Still, two out of three ain’t bad.
But the true measure of Taormina, her true gold medal, was her Olympian persistence.
A very good NCAA swimmer at the University of Georgia, Taormina missed qualifying for the Olympics in 1998 and 1992. Without the road map of success provided by 41-year-old triple Olympic silver medalist swimmer Dara Torres this year, it took foolish courage for Taormina to try to stay in the game and pursue her Olympic dream at an age when most swimmers had hung up their goggles. Virtually broke and working odd jobs, Taormina moved back and started swimming under her high school coach. When it came down to her Alamo moment in the 1996 Olympic Trials, she qualified for one of the six places on the 4x200 relay by 1/100th of a second. During the Olympics, she was chosen for the finals squad on the basis of performance in the prelims by another razor thin margin.
After her swift rise in triathlon, Taormina rolling along happily with a World Cup win or two and a top-three world ranking when some injuries hit. Then, the ebullient, generous Taormina became the victim of a vicious stalker who started off asking her for training advice. In short order, the man was making obscene propositions and threatening her with violent mayhem if she wouldn’t succumb to his fantasies. What angered Taormina and increased her anguish was the initial reaction by the first police investigator. His first disgusting reaction was: You must have done something to lead him on.
With the unwavering support of USA Triathlon and her coach (and former prosecutor) Lew Kidder, Taormina managed to elude the stalker while she won her world title and made the 2004 Olympics. Eventually, once the misogynist cop was off the case, the stalker was caught and successfully prosecuted. But Taormina paid a heavy psychological price – she became understandably paranoid and lost trust in much of her dealings with humanity.
After her retirement from triathlon, the road to modern pentathlon was rugged. Fencing, shooting and riding lessons plus travel cost $50,000-$100,000 a year. Some faithful sponsors like Speedo and Amino Vital were helpful, but could not cover the costs. Despite the national coverage she received, no big mainstream sponsor stepped up to the plate during her first two years. So she sold her house in Florida. Her first year in the sport, one fencing sparring partner’s epee slipped in between her protective padding and left a deep bone bruise under her arm. She fell several times from balky horses and suffered painful but luckily not serious injuries.
Many times in the final year before Beijing, Taormina wondered why in hell she continued when she faced depression, financial ruin, the risk of getting thrown and smashed under 1,300-pound horses. To top it off, she was the top ranked American women in the world standings but faced missing the Olympic team due to an abstruse and indecipherable set of qualifying standards.
Finally, Taormina crossed the finish line. After all the moments of doubt and pain, she took stock.
The only woman in modern history to make the Olympic team in three separate sports cracked a smile and said: “So worth it now. I’m just thanking God over and over. So thankful I want to cry.”
All pics © Timothy Carlson