A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America

Epilogue

e p i L o g u e performance-enhanced Athletes and “ghetto Cinderellas” Black Women Athletes Enter the Twenty-First Century By the time Jackie Joyner-Kersee approached her fourth Olympic games in 1996, black women athletes had been involved in athletic competition in some form or another for close to eighty years. During that time, they had pushed back against stereotypes that suggested they should not compete , and they had embraced images and opportunities created for them so they could. They had been aided by an expansive black community, and coaches and mentors who dedicated their lives to making it possible for black women to train and compete in tennis, basketball, and track and field. Sometimes the community expected things of these women that they were hesitant, even unwilling, to give, particularly as they determined their place in an increasingly active civil rights movement. For many years they had to find ways to integrate themselves into a white sporting world that, for the most part, did not want them. But at times they found unexpected help in that world that meant the continuation of a career. They had, in short, found it necessary for many of those years to come to terms with what it meant to be black women athletes both in the African American community and white society, negotiating issues of race, gender, and class in both places. As black women approached the twenty-first century, their stories reflected change, but also some strikingly familiar concerns. The world  of track and field and its athletes continued to grapple with the overwhelming presence of performance-enhancing drugs. In a sport where accusation as much as testing continued to link athletes’ names with steroids, black women track athletes, particularly Gail Devers, Gwen Torrence, and Marion Jones, continued to be front and center. Stereotypes continued to plague the athletes and they discovered new methods to battle them. Yet the ways that their intersection with drugs and innuendo manifested itself and went public differed prominently from their predecessors. After forty years of waiting for another African American woman to take up where Althea Gibson left off, Venus and Serena Williams produced not one but two black women champions. Their race and working-class background combined to indicate that these categories were still very much a part of the world in which they operated, in ways both similar to and different from Washington and Gibson. In short, the record on the changes that have occurred to black women in sport in the aftermath of Joyner-Kersee’s career is, to say the least, mixed. running Clean?—“the Specter of illicit drug use” and Black women Athletes As Joyner-Kersee was battling for her second consecutive Olympic gold in the heptathlon at the 1992 Barcelona games, another drama was playing out in the 100-meter sprint. Gwen Torrence, an Atlanta native who competed at the University of Georgia in the 1980s on full scholarship, had won the Olympic trials and was expected to take the gold in Barcelona. But Gail Devers, another Bob Kersee product, could not be ruled out. She had come in second at the trials, and while she had not been particularly close to Torrence’s first-place finish, over a month had elapsed. With Kersee breathing down Devers’s neck to get in as much training as possible before the games, the race was far from a given. Gail Devers’s story had already been a dramatic one. In June 1988, Devers was a senior at UCLA under Kersee’s tutelage. She had qualified for the Olympic trials in four events—the 100- and 200-meter sprints, 100-meter hurdles, and long jump. She chose to concentrate on the 100meter events and made the Olympic team in both the sprint and hurdles. But in Seoul, she completely fell apart. Not only did she not medal in either of her events, she failed to make the finals. Following numerous  PERFORMANCE-ENHANCED ATHLETES tests to account for the seemingly inexplicable decline, doctors finally diagnosed her with Graves’ disease, a hyperthyroid condition that had resulted in wild weight fluctuations, the loss of vision in her left eye, uncontrollable shaking and heavy, almost constant menstrual cycles. Fortunately, the condition could be controlled with medication; unfortunately , Devers refused to take it because it was on the IOC’s banned substances list. Instead, she chose an alterative regimen, radiation. Slowly, those treatments...