Oerter Has Staying Power

Now it can be told.

When Carl Lewis defied age, confounded the odds and irritated Michael Johnson by winning the long jump at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, he became just the third athlete in history to be a gold medalist in the same event in four consecutive Olympics.

One of the two men who did it before him, discus legend Al Oerter, made it his business to be on hand and offer the appropriate congratulations - a bit of graciousness worth noting in that Oerter has been a vocal critic of the money-driven modern athlete Lewis so ignobly typified.

And yet …

“I wanted to punch him,” Oerter admitted. “I wanted to wring his neck.”

But he didn’t.

Al Oerter understood that Lewis’ night was a gala moment for track and field in the United States and only a boor would soil the linen. By contrast, when it came time for Lewis to bid goodbye to the sport that made him rich, he would take a ceremonial final lap - at halftime of a college football game.

Of course, there is an upside. We haven’t heard a peep from Carl Lewis since.

Meanwhile, America can’t seem to get enough of Al Oerter.

In the Olympic year - 28 years after he won the last of his four gold medals - Oerter took 440 airline flights at the behest of sponsors, corporations, camps and civic groups who figured a brush with this giant would be good for sales, morale or motivation.

The demand drops between Olympics, but here was Oerter on Tuesday at the Ironwood Throwers Camp at North Idaho College - gassing with teenagers whose parents may not have been born when he won his first gold medal and offering tips when he felt it appropriate.

Which wasn’t often.

“I was self-coached and I don’t want to screw anybody up,” Oerter said. “As far as the technique of the throw, I don’t want anybody following my lead.

“I was never the best discus thrower at any of those Olympics. I was just the best prepared.”

The only thing he wasn’t prepared for was retirement.

He did take nine restless years off after the 1968 Games because he had two young daughters to raise “and you don’t gain those years back.” But when they reached college age and his first marriage fell apart in 1976, the magnetic pull of the Olympics was felt once again.

Indeed, the only thing more legendary than Oerter’s Olympic triumphs - each time as an underdog to a world-record holder - was his comeback. At age 43, he threw the discus 227 feet, 11 inches - just missing a berth on the 1980 Olympic team that wound up going nowhere. Not quite 10 years later, this competition junkie still topped 200 feet at the World Veterans Games.

“I won by 40 feet,” he recalled, “and thought, ‘This is no fun.”’ Even at age 61, Oerter looks as if he could throw just as far - those Popeye forearms just as thick and taut as they were in ‘68 or ‘80. And he’s been invited to Australia later this summer to throw in the Asian-Pacific Games.

“But they make allowances for you the older you get,” he said. “They allow you to throw a lighter discus. In my age group, they throw the 1-kilo (the discus women throw, half the regulation men’s weight) and it’s like trying to throw a potato chip. Or a ping pong ball.”

Sometimes it is hard to tell if it’s Oerter who has the grip on the discus or the other way around.

For instance, just before coming to Coeur d’Alene, Oerter was at the U.S. championships in New Orleans, where organizers feted the 1968 team with a 30-year reunion. Performances by the likes of Bob Beamon, Lee Evans, Dick Fosbury and Oerter changed the face of track. Protests like the black-glove salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos changed the Games into a political arena, as well.

Oerter was hardly oblivious.

“In 1968, you had Martin Luther King being murdered, and later Robert Kennedy,” he said. “The war in Vietnam was creating chaos socially, and the Democratic National Convention was a bloodbath. Then Tommie raised his fist.

“I never cared what Tommie had done - I wasn’t into the politics.”

And yet he later admitted to being pro-boycott in 1980, to being “a citizen first.

“I’ve had a family, a career and I’ve also thrown the discus in the Olympic Games - probably in that order,” he said. “It’s something I’ve done, but it’s never dominated my life. And that’s probably why I’ve succeeded. When something like throwing is the only consuming thing in your life, that’s got to be a lot of pressure on you to do well.”

Still, he wishes track was a more consuming passion in this country. He ticks off the sport’s chronic maladies - inattentive leadership, poor packaging for television, the lack of important domestic meets, big-name athletes ducking rivalries, even the metric system.

“My niece is competing in a meet this weekend in a little dink town in Iowa,” he said. “She and her mother and father will get there at 8 a.m. and they’ll be turning their car lights on to illuminate the track so the meet can finish at 9 at night. No wonder kids and parents say they can’t do this anymore.”

Of course, track and field to Oerter was always a solitary pursuit. Even now, he will retreat home to Monument, Colo., take his gear to the track and hurl his discus at the Rocky Mountains.

No more Olympics in his future, but the ideal firmly in place.

You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.