Lucy Fox’s dream still lives, even though it has been many years since she left her home in Memphis at age 12 to pursue it.

It lives on in every young gymnast she works with in her travels throughout the southeast.

Her dream was to become an Olympic gymnast and though she had to watch the 1984 U.S. gymnastics team win the gold with her on the sidelines, she still is living her dream everyday.

The former U.S. Olympic team member and Georgia gymnast was in Vicksburg on Thursday conducting clinics at Gym South and sharing her experience with the youngsters in her charge.

The former Lucy Wener passed through the 1984 Olympic tryouts and was primed to make a run at bars, her best event when fate intervened. Her team was walking on a golf course during a training session and she stepped into a hole, injuring her knee.

She got some treatment, but in the time before MRIs, the U.S. team medical staff had no idea how serious the damage was.

During a dual exhibition meet with the Canadian team, a warmup for the  games two weeks before, Fox felt a twinge in her other knee. Then she got the bad news. She was going to miss the Olympics. She ended up going to the games as an alternate and had to have surgery on both of her knees.

“It was very hard,” Fox said. “You fulfill your dream, you get to be a part of your dream, but you don’t get to compete. That was one thing that motivated me going to college, because I felt I had something to prove. There’s success and there’s non-success and it doesn’t mean you’re a failure. But you’ve got to rise above it and figure out a different path.”

But in the soil of despair, the seeds of hope and redemption were planted. Georgia gymnastics coach Suzanne Yoculan, who started the Lady Bulldog program in 1982, knew that for her program to succeed, she needed an Olympian on the squad.

Enter Fox.

She was rejected by Alabama and a host of other schools before Yoculan decided to bring her to Georgia.

It was a match made in heaven. At the time, college gymnastics was not the big-time pursuit it is today. It was not even taken seriously by gymnasts as a place to improve their craft. Fox and her Olympic teammate, Marie Rothlisberger, were the first two Olympic gymnasts to take the sport to the college ranks.

“College gymnastics was kind of a joke,” Fox said. “It wasn’t hard. Now today, it’s amazing what they do. We were the first two to really start it up.”

Fox and her teammates were reduced to spreading the gospel about their sport around Athens, Ga. Like a band trying to build a fan base, the Gym Dogs hit the grass roots.

“We’d hand out fliers on cars, in the classroom and ask people to come to our meet,” Fox said. “We’d get stacks of them and go to the restaurants.”

But as the voice from the cornfield said to John Kinsella, “if you build it, they will come.”

The fans slowly started to trickle into Stegman Coliseum. Home meets got bigger and bigger. Fox became the first Georgia gymnast to win a national individual title in the uneven bars in 1986.

Then the Gym Dogs hit the big time in the 1987 NCAA championship. The top-ranked Utah program hosted the event and had won six titles in a row. But the Gym Dogs, with Fox playing a big role, stunned the defending champions and gave Yoculan her first national title. Fox defended her uneven bars title with a 9.7.

Then in the 1989 national championship in Athens, Fox did something never before done in her final appearance before her home fans. She started her uneven bars routine, which boasted outlandishly complex release moves, and when she finished, the crowd roared, her coach rose to her feet and scoreboard glowed in triumph with a 10.0. It was the first 10.0 awarded in NCAA gymnastics.

It was the capper on a tremendous career at Georgia and redemption for the disappointment of not being able to take the floor in the Olympics.

Now Fox, a married mother of two in Memphis, works with the U.S. Junior National team, conducts clinics and does choreography.

Her daughter, age 10, has taken up the family mantle in gymnastics and has been practicing for six months. She hopes her daughter doesn’t feel like she has to measure up to her mother’s achievements in the sport.

As for dealing with her students, the biggest thing she wants to get across to kids is this: be as good as you can possibly be.

“I love the kids learning, no matter what level they are,” Fox said. “When you start taking the fun out of the sport and putting expectations on the child, in whatever sport, they’re not going to grow in that sport as much as they can.

“When I coach a kid, I coach them to be the best that they can be and wherever that will take them. “They’re children. They’re going to make mistakes. It’s okay to make a mistake, just as long as you learn from that mistake. I like to see them grow as athletes and as young women.”

*

Contact Steve Wilson at swilson@vicksburgpost.com.