Stuczynski dismayed by overreaction to comments
BEIJING — It’s true, Jenn Stuczynski said. The joy of winning a silver medal at the Olympics has been diminished by what took place afterward. But it wasn’t Rick Suhr’s behavior that did it. It was public overreaction to the exchange between them moments after the pole vault ended last Monday.
“The last three days have been a nightmare,” Stuczynski said Saturday afternoon from her hotel room in Munich, Germany, where she was en route to a competition in Zurich, Switzerland. “They’re hammering my coach. When you attack my coach, you attack me, too.
“It’s a relationship, a coach and an athlete. That’s the part that bothered me. We have worked so hard to come this far and they’re pinpointing one person. It’s two people. It’s unfortunate that the cameras didn’t see the celebration afterward, or the encouragement he gives me.”
What the NBC cameras did catch was Suhr giving Stuczynski a blunt and seemingly harsh assessment of her performance shortly after she missed her fourth try at 4.90 meters, assuring Russia’s Yelena Isinbayeva of the gold medal and leaving Stuczynski with the silver.
Viewers heard Suhr telling Stuczynski she had “lost takeoff on the bigger heights. You’ve got to learn to keep takeoff. You got caught at that meat grinder again.”
What Suhr meant by the “meat grinder” was that Stuczynski had expended too much energy at the midlevel jumps, sapping the energy from her legs and leaving her too weak to clear 4.90. She lacked the power on her takeoffs, despite getting four attempts due to an officiating error.
Stuczynski said viewers weren’t aware she had initiated the conversation by asking Suhr what she had done wrong. Unlike Suhr, she wasn’t miked.
“I went over and asked what happened,” she said. “He told me. That was the end of it. I was kind of upset with myself. I had four tries to make a bar and did the same thing four times. I’d done it at my last meet, too. I had promised myself going in not to lose a takeoff and slow down at the box and I did. For me it was frustrating.
“What he said was true. In a way, it made me feel better. It wasn’t malicious. It was what I did wrong. It was actually a positive thing. He told me I’d won silver.”
Stuczynski said she hadn’t watched a tape of her exchange with Suhr. But she said her startled expression had more to do with the surroundings than her coach’s words. She said she was looking down to avoid tripping over a moving NBC camera, which might have been interpreted as a downtrodden reaction.
“I want to make sure people understand how thankful I am for all their support,” she said. “I don’t want it to seem otherwise.”
But she was dismayed by the reaction back home. Suhr has received a firestorm of criticism on Internet message boards, on Buffalo News blogs and on Suhr’s personal Web site. Stuczynski said Suhr’s two teenage children have been the subject of teasing at their home in suburban Rochester. Stuczynski said she has done several interviews in recent days and been surprised by the negative tone of the questioning. It’s not as if she was disappointed with silver. But she is a competitor and she wanted to beat Isinbayeva, and her first instinct was to ask Suhr where she fell short.
“I don’t ask for him to be a cheerleader,” Stuczynski said. “I don’t want him to carry pompoms and tell me I’m great when I’m not. That’s not the athlete I want to be. I don’t want the constant stroking of my ego. I want someone to be honest and fair. That wasn’t an attack, it wasn’t even criticism. It was the facts. That’s the way I took it.
“I haven’t seen the video. But people were still running other races. Rick had to scream over 91,000 fans, over the photographers, over the other athletes. The microphone makes it sound tenfold. It reminds me of reality TV, where they only show the sensational stuff and cut things out afterward. The announcers didn’t help. It started a snowball effect.”
Stuczynski felt too much was made of her comment earlier in the summer that she wanted to “kick some Russian butt” in Beijing. She said it was an emotional reaction after a meet in which she finished second to Isinbayeva and Russian women were third and fourth — the same way it ended here.
Isinbayeva made a big deal of Stuczynski’s comment during the news conference last Monday (Stuczynski missed it because she was being drug tested). She said Stuczynski hadn’t showed enough respect for her. Jenn said that wasn’t the case.
“It’s competition,” she said, “but you respect people. Everyone is there feeling the same nerves, the same anxieties over the last month coming in. You say congratulations because everyone knows what you’re going through. [Isinbayeva] had a lot of pressure going in and winning had to be a relief.”
As for the notion that the public reaction would have been different if she were a man, Stuczynski said she can see the point. But she said her gender should have nothing to do with it.
“People don’t understand this is my job,” she said. “I pay Rick to be my coach and to tell me what’s wrong. He tells me when I’m good and he tells me when I’m bad. I asked what I did wrong and he told me. I’m 26 years old. I can think for myself. I’m a strong girl. My parents raised me to be strong and I was not even remotely sad that night.
“I just hope that some day I can walk down the streets of Fredonia with my coach and have people congratulate us both.”
