Kerri Strug

Get ready for Kerri Strug, actress-endorser-motivational speaker. The American gymnast spent yesterday going through stacks of money-making offers she's received since vaulting through the pain of an injured left ankle and into Olympic lore, helping the United States win its first women's team gold medal. "She's looking at everything from movie deals to a lot of corporate companies, speaking engagements," said Sheryl Shade, a family adviser who hopes to become Strug's agent.

There it was, amid the glossy huckstering, the sappy set pieces, the Tesh-ian babble: a moment with the authentic drama, the do-it-or-don't clarity, that still draws us to athletics - despite the hype and greed. There was tiny Kerri Strug, supporting player on the American gymnastics team, her ankle throbbing and her spirit reeling, staring at a runway, springboard and vault, knowing her dreams and those of her six Olympic teammates depended on her doing something difficult, foolish and brave.

Kerri Strug, a 4-foot-9 gymnast, will perform a sort of reverse somersault next fall. She will go from the Olympics in Atlanta to the gymnastics team at UCLA. No one seems to have done this before - go from competing against the best gymnasts in the world to a sport that in college has all the panache of, say, field hockey or golf. But Strug, who won an Olympic bronze in 1992, can hardly wait to be a Bruin, to wear the gold and blue, to cheer for her teammates and get teary-eyed when she hears the school song.

The Eagles-Cowboys battle last night was about proving yourself, and doing it in front of the whole world, in the greatest NFL payback arena: Monday night football. Anytime something that big is going on, there are sure to be celebrities - or, at least, people who look like celebrities or know real celebrities. Last night at the Vet, among the scores of the beautiful people topped with moussed hair and the swarms of heavy-breathing green fans, walked a famous boxing announcer, a sports power broker, an orchestra conductor, a legendary Indy car racing father and son, and an Olympic gold-medal-winning gymnast and the mayor who stood her up. Mayor Rendell said, "I didn't know Kerri Strug was here," and then rushed off to entertain his own armchair quarterback crew.

Kerri Strug stood at the top of the runway, the vault 75 feet away, the 32,000 seats full of people screaming at the top of their lungs. She was preparing to sprint down that runway and perform a Yurchenko 1 1/2 twisting vault, one of the toughest moves women gymnasts attempt. And Strug couldn't feel her left leg. Here she was, a tiny 18-year-old who had stayed in this sport after winning a bronze medal in the 1992 Olympics for only one reason - to win a gold medal. That medal was waiting to be hung around her neck, but she needed to do this vault, to stick it, to finish on her feet and not on her backside, as she had on her first attempt.

Individual tickets for the four sessions of the U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Trials, June 19-22 at the Wachovia Center, go on sale at noon tomorrow. Tickets, from $30 to $95, will be available at ComcastTIX.com, 1-800-298-4200, the Wachovia Center Box Office, select Acme locations, and through participating area gymnastics clubs. Visa is the only credit card accepted. Also tomorrow at noon, the public is invited to an "Olympic Celebration for Gymnastics" at LOVE Park. Mayor Nutter, legendary coach Bela Karolyi, and Olympic gold medalist Kerri Strug will be on hand as local gymnastic clubs perform.

Kerri Strug, who dramatically clinched a gold medal for the U.S. women's gymnastics team last Tuesday by vaulting with a sprained left ankle, did not compete last night in her specialty, the floor exercise, because of the injury. Strug had until 30 minutes before the event to determine whether she would compete in the individual-event finals. Just before last night's session at the Georgia Dome, where medals were to be awarded in three men's and two women's events, Strug appeared at the edge of the exercise mat with Romanian Nadia Comaneci and American Bart Conner, both previous gold-medal winners, who served as "hosts" of the competition.

The flame got lit last night, and the schussing, lutzing and slapshotting begin in earnest today. Didn't we just have one of these Olympic things? It seems as if barely enough time has elapsed since the last five-ring sports circus for Kerri Strug's famous ankle sprain to have healed or for the ugly mud to be scraped from Richard Jewell's name. What's happened is that the quadrennial sporting festivals now arrive every two years, with the Winter Games staggered between Summer Games, largely to give the sub-freezing events a shot at more attention.

Everyone who saw it said it was like something from a movie. Tiny teen gymnast Kerri Strug, her ankle aching from a nasty sprain, summoned her courage and sprinted down the runway to attempt a vault. Not much pressure. Only about a billion people watching around the world. The only thing at stake was a championship. For her. For her team. For her country. Strug believed she needed a near-perfect performance to assure her country a gold medal, and she delivered. It's rare the oversold Olympics can squeeze real tears from Americans anymore, but many admit to shedding a few when brave little Kerri hobbled through the award ceremony on her air cast.

The U.S. women had just delivered their best team performance ever at the World Gymnastics Championships, finishing second to the Soviet Union. Kerri Strug was hung like a Christmas tree with the decorations of success, a silver medal around her neck, a bouquet of flowers in her hands, a wide smile draped across her face. For the moment anyway, all her questions had answers. "It's hard," she said. "Sometimes you don't know if you want to do this. But this makes it worthwhile.

Individual tickets for the four sessions of the U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Trials, June 19-22 at the Wachovia Center, go on sale at noon tomorrow. Tickets, from $30 to $95, will be available at ComcastTIX.com, 1-800-298-4200, the Wachovia Center Box Office, select Acme locations, and through participating area gymnastics clubs. Visa is the only credit card accepted. Also tomorrow at noon, the public is invited to an "Olympic Celebration for Gymnastics" at LOVE Park. Mayor Nutter, legendary coach Bela Karolyi, and Olympic gold medalist Kerri Strug will be on hand as local gymnastic clubs perform.

As well as anybody, Chellsie Memmel knows that when it comes to earning a spot on the U.S. Olympic gymnastic team, timing and luck are as crucial as a clean floor routine. When the U.S. Olympic trials are held June 19 to 22 at the Wachovia Center, Memmel will have a great chance to make the team and could become a household name competing in Beijing. If she's healthy. "She just needs to stay healthy these last seven months," 1996 U.S. Olympic hero Kerri Strug said yesterday.

Whatever domestic tranquility existed inside the Constitution Center yesterday was shattered as soon as Bela Karolyi, resembling a hatless Santa with his mustachioed smile, silver hair and bright red blazer, bounded in to promote the more perfect union formed by Philadelphia and the 2008 Olympic Gymnastics trials. "This will be great!" shouted the legendary coach in an accent that, 25 years after he emigrated here from Romania, is still as thick as Bela Lugosi's. "When the trials are in Philadelphia my good friend here, Franklin Benjamin [pointing to Franklin impersonator Ralph Archbold]

In a era in which behemoths seem to dominate every sport, it was hard to fathom that the waif of a woman signing autographs at the Franklin Institute last week was "the most decorated American gymnast, male or female, in history. " Her name is Shannon Miller and, a decade after her greatest glory on the world stage, she still looked very much like the 5-foot, 97-pound pixie who won three silver and two bronze medals in the 1992 Olympics and two golds - one individual, one team - at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Kristen Maloney took a long, long walk. In distance, it was only the length of the runway leading up to the vaulting horse. In time, it was only a few seconds. In Maloney's mind, though, the walk from her disastrous first vault to the starting point for her second was long enough to regroup. The first vault had ended with Maloney on her knees, facing the horse, and stunned to find herself there. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. She dried her tears. She looked around the Sydney Superdome and remembered that this was it. The Olympics.

The Atlanta Olympics produced a highlights reel dominated by U.S. athletes as the host nation ran away with the medal count and loaded up on dramatic finishes. There was Dot Richardson's home run against China in the gold-medal softball game, and David Reid's improbable final-round knockout to take a boxing gold away from a Cuban opponent. But no moment from Atlanta had the impact or, forgive the pun, the legs of Kerri Strug's courageous, ankle-throbbing run, vault, and landing at the conclusion of the women's gymnastics competition.

If a businessperson occasionally performs financial gymnastics to start a company, just think of what Rick Palumbo had to do to open his gymnastics center in Phoenixville. Palumbo, a former Pennsylvania State University and Olympic gymnastics coach, has sunk $200,000 into his 14,000-square-foot Aerials Fit 'n' Fun Gymnastics Center, which he opened in the Valley Forge Mall in March. Aerials joins an estimated 3,500 gymnastic centers throughout the United States. Palumbo thinks that he has demographics on his side and that Aerials will fill a growing need for sports education outside the school system.

The flame got lit last night, and the schussing, lutzing and slapshotting begin in earnest today. Didn't we just have one of these Olympic things? It seems as if barely enough time has elapsed since the last five-ring sports circus for Kerri Strug's famous ankle sprain to have healed or for the ugly mud to be scraped from Richard Jewell's name. What's happened is that the quadrennial sporting festivals now arrive every two years, with the Winter Games staggered between Summer Games, largely to give the sub-freezing events a shot at more attention.

The Eagles-Cowboys battle last night was about proving yourself, and doing it in front of the whole world, in the greatest NFL payback arena: Monday night football. Anytime something that big is going on, there are sure to be celebrities - or, at least, people who look like celebrities or know real celebrities. Last night at the Vet, among the scores of the beautiful people topped with moussed hair and the swarms of heavy-breathing green fans, walked a famous boxing announcer, a sports power broker, an orchestra conductor, a legendary Indy car racing father and son, and an Olympic gold-medal-winning gymnast and the mayor who stood her up. Mayor Rendell said, "I didn't know Kerri Strug was here," and then rushed off to entertain his own armchair quarterback crew.

Up the dial a bit from where swimmer Amy Van Dyken and six members of the U.S. women's gymnastics team appeared on CBS's "David Letterman Show" last night, Olympic beach volleyballers Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes could be seen yukking it up on NBC's "Tonight Show with Jay Leno. " By the end of the week, softballer Dot Richardson and sprinter Michael Johnson will have graced Letterman's program, while decathlete Dan O'Brien and gymnast Kerri Strug will have done the same for Leno.