The Double Romanian Twist

McNamara and 23-year-old Kathy Johnson fared better. When Retton scored 9.2 on the beam, Johnson countered with a 9.5, despite a slip, but on the vault Dianne gave them a layout Tsukahara with a full twist—a move many women try but few achieve—and came down with a 9.9. In the floor exercise Retton unleashed some of the night's highest bounces and collected another 9.2. Johnson fell attempting a double back-pike, that old forehead smasher, and still got a 9.05—which told everybody in the house just how tough it was going to be to nudge aside the judges' oldtime favorites. She finished fifth.

Ah, but there was no stopping the kids. Mary Lou produced her almost patented Retton on the uneven bars—a 9.6 effort—and in the vault she had the guts to actually go for a Tsukahara double twist, a 1� layout backward somersault with not one, but two twists. Only Mary Lou has ever done this—just three weeks ago, at the Elite Nationals in Colorado Springs , scoring a 10—and for a moment all competition stopped. She doggone near made it this time: Seldom has the air been so full of one spinning, twisting body. It earned her a 9.6, and that pretty much was that.

When the smoke cleared, Durham, a powerful gymnast still young enough to carry a Teddy bear around the arena under one arm, had won it all, with 76.10 points out of a possible 80—behold, the first black woman champion in the sport. In second place with 75.05 was the 17-year-old McNamara, and in third, just .05 of a point away with 75.00 even, was Retton.

Durham's and Retton's vault into the big time also marked the seemingly inexorable advance of Karolyi, the new guy on the continent. Some U.S. gymnastics folks are bitter about his success. To hear them talk, one would think Karolyi had swept the girls up in his great Transylvanian cape. Perhaps what many in the sport forget is that the good old-fashioned talent raid is a particularly American institution; heck, sporting tycoons have been doing it for years. Any coach who lets himself get beat at the game by a newcomer would do better to pause and rethink the situation.

The men's competition was relatively free of intrigue: While exciting, it went more or less as expected. The winner was Mitch Gaylord , 22, of UCLA , followed by Peter Vidmar, 21, also of UCLA , and Jim Hartung, 22, from Nebraska . Conner, a former World Cup champ on pommel horse and world champ on bars, an old man at 25 who operates out of Norman, Okla. , finished ninth—safely, of course, on the traveling team.

In Sunday's individual-event finals, the traditional showboat part of these meets, the earlier winners simply proved their performances had not been flukes. When the chalk dust had settled, Gaylord was champ of the floor exercise, still rings and parallel bars, and Dianne had swept the titles in floor exercise, vault and beam.

A dynasty was in the making last weekend, but after all, dynasties aren't hard to build when you know how. "I learned all this," Karolyi says, "in the school of life."