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That's the basic Torrence M.O.: suspect you, whip you, like you -- in that order. "She's not very trusting of people," says Bahamian sprinter Pauline Davis, a close friend. "Me, I trust you until you do something. Gwen is just the opposite. She has a wall up. You have to kick that wall down."
Of course, you do not need to take a Dale Carnegie seminar to be a great sprinter. You need speed, and you need stubbornness. Torrence has gobs of both. When she went home to Decatur from college in the summers, she would work twice as hard as any of the football players who hung around town. "You'd always see her running -- in the gym, outside, anywhere," says Henry Harris, a high school and college teammate of Fred Lane's. "You'd see her in the hottest part of the day training on the track, and then you'd see her training later that afternoon. And we'd go, 'Damn, Gwen's goin' somewhere.'"
The first place she went after college was the world track and field circuit, where she has left some indelible spike marks. Since 1990 she has won more world-championship and Olympic medals than any other athlete in her sport. During one three-year stretch she won 49 straight races. She has also made more enemies than most people have socks.
Torrence sees a lot of cheaters in her sport, and if there was one thing her mama taught her to hate, it was cheaters. All Dorothy had to do was look out her window and point at the dope sellers on the street. "You see that?" she would say to Gwen. "That's not right." Anybody who lied or cheated in Dorothy's house got the belt.
Right out of the chute, 1991: Torrence goes to the World Championships in Tokyo and wins two silvers; both golds go to Germany's Katrin Krabbe. Only who should fail a drug test later? Krabbe. Did they give Torrence Krabbe's two golds the way they gave a gold to Carl Lewis when Ben Johnson proved to have been juiced up at the Seoul Olympics? No. (Krabbe did not test positive until after the World Championships.) A lousy start to things.
And then there is the personal piano Torrence carries on her back: Florence Griffith Joyner. Don't get Gwen started on Flo-Jo. Since the summer of 1988, when Flo-Jo crushed the world record in the 100 (with that time of 10.49) on a windy day in Indianapolis in July and added the 200 record (21.34 seconds) in Seoul two months later, no female sprinter has come anywhere near her marks. They are so far out of reach that track magazines refer to "the non-Flo-Jo mark of 10.76" when talking about the world record. Do you know that the wind-gauge reading on every other race that day in Indianapolis was never less than 3-point-something meters per second? (Anything over 2.0 invalidates a world record.) That the readings before Flo-Jo's record and after it were 4-point-something? But for the record itself the gauge read 0.0? "C'mon!" says Torrence. "My heat was 5.0, and I ran 10.78."
And what of the whispering about Flo-Jo's using steroids -- allegations that have never been proved? "Anybody in their right mind has to wonder," says Torrence. "There's no way -- no way! -- she went from a [personal best of] 10.9 to 10.49. And a 21.9 to 21.3? It doesn't happen that way. When Ben Johnson came back clean, he was running 10.44. That means she could've beaten Ben! Florence has always been gorgeous, but I felt like there was a physical change in her in '88. Now I see her, she has a softer look. You can say she's not training hard anymore, but facial structure doesn't change like that. It's not the same look she had."
And then there is this little thing inside Torrence that won't let her take losing all that well. She does not lose often, but when she does, something always seems to divert attention from the losing: a knee injury, fatigue or not having trained to peak for the meet. At the '92 Olympics, after she didn't win a medal in the 100, which she was expected to do, she blurted out to reporters that two of the three medalists were "dirty." The medalists were Gail Devers of the U.S. (gold), Juliet Cuthbert of Jamaica (silver) and Irina Privalova of Russia (bronze). Torrence offered no evidence for her charge. Except for creating an international incident and branding Torrence as a sore loser, the accusation went over quite well.
"Gwen Torrence can kiss my ass," Bob Kersee, Devers's coach, said by way of a denial. Cuthbert wanted to fight Torrence the next day on the infield. "My mother read what Gwen said about me in Barcelona," Cuthbert says. "My mother said, 'Drugs? My girl's on drugs?' I had to call her and tell her it wasn't true." Writers crucified Torrence for pointing the finger without proof. But why, Torrence wondered, did everybody go mental? To her, these cheaters were just getting what they deserved, which was the belt.
"I was gonna try to get control of the drug problem some kind of way," Torrence says now. "I was hoping I would win and the message would've come across better. What bothered me was that people came up to me afterward and said, 'This wasn't the place or the time.' And I'm like, 'Why are you guys afraid? You know there's a problem.'"
What was more amazing was that Torrence came back and won the Olympic 200 five days later, with torrents of rage aimed at her by the world's sprinters and track press. Talk about stubborn.
"I looked at myself in the mirror, and I kissed myself on both shoulders," Torrence says about those days in Barcelona. "I knew I had done nothing wrong. When track is all over for me, I want to still have my kidneys and my liver. I don't want to develop some disease because I wanted to win a race."
It is good that Torrence likes herself, because she is about as popular on the women's track scene as bunions. "Nobody likes her," says Cuthbert. "Nobody on her own team likes her! She's the biggest bitch in track. I'd like to kick Gwen's butt, I swear. If she says one more thing to me, I will."
If this sounds childish, it's because childishness is at the heart of the 100-meter event. Every little girl sprinted on field day in kindergarten; the winner got a blue ribbon. Then the girls all went on to other things. But sprinters somehow became defined by their talent. The faster you were, the slower you got to walk, the more daring you got to dress. And since the race takes only 11 seconds, the competition among sprinters seems to stretch out in other, odd ways. Cuthbert and Torrence, for instance, seem to have a vogue-a-thon going, with Cuthbert ahead right now in Skimpiest Leotard and Torrence way ahead in Coolest Hair Weaves. ("This one I've got on right now?" Torrence says. "Three hundred fifty dollars.") It's pretty much a dead heat in Vicious Quotes.
None of that gets to Torrence. But last summer something got to her. At the World Championships in Göteborg she was disqualified in the 200, which she won by four meters, for stepping out of her lane. When the DQ was announced, there were cheers from the Jamaican team and delegation, including second-place finisher Merlene Ottey, then Torrence's idol, who was declared the winner and who then ripped Torrence in a press conference. That made Torrence cry. She is a crier anyway. She cries over Little House on the Prairie. You should have seen her dissolve in tears on the victory stand in Barcelona at the playing of the national anthem after her victory in the 200. But the '95 worlds were one of the few occasions she let the poisons of the track world get to her tear ducts. "Merlene called me a cheater," Torrence says. "That hurt me inside."
But she has had time to think about the Jamaicans and all the other people who would love to see her fall on the bottom of her USA racing skin this summer in Atlanta. "My preacher said something in church the other day," Torrence says. "He said, 'How can a person like you when they don't like themselves?' When somebody has no reason on this earth to dislike me, they must dislike themselves."
Torrence is trying to be more careful these days, trying to think things out before she speaks to reporters, trying to bite her lip and unball her fists before proceeding. "She's just now learning how to control herself, to not let her background creep up like a monster, like an evil twin," says Davis. "Because one side of Gwen is really great, and the other side is an awful person."
The problem is, Ms. Awful Person gets most of the press. "Oh, yeah, the media love that type of stuff," Torrence says, staring at Danny! (special guest: Divine Brown). "They have an obsession with the bad. I'm sorry I'm not this bad person people want me to be. I'm a much better person." And if she had to go on one of those talk shows to tell her side of the story? "Oprah," she says. "Definitely Oprah." ("Widely Hated Track Divas.")
All of this is what makes Torrence the Reluctant Olympic Heroine. But look at it from her side. If you had a brother who could not run, could not walk, could use only his wrists, neck and head, would you want the world to make a big deal out of how fast you make it from one end of a football field to the other?
Charles Torrence -- CT, everybody calls him -- is 47 now and weighs maybe 110 pounds. He has been paralyzed for 24 years, since Gwen was six. Next to his home hospital bed in a Decatur apartment that he keeps mostly dark are stacks of videotapes, almost all of races that Gwen has run. "I'm probably her biggest fan," Charles says, his head back on the pillow. Yet he has seen her run live as a professional only once -- at the 1995 Mobil/USA Indoor Championships in Atlanta, where she won the 60. Charles doesn't get to see Gwen much when she's not competing, either. ("She's so busy," he says.) He hears that the house she lives in is really something, but he hasn't been in it. He is looking forward to the Olympics, only he doesn't have a ticket yet. "Maybe if you write it in your magazine, somebody will send me one," he says.
He really ought to go, because this is fixing to be one delicious 100: Cuthbert, Ottey, Privalova, all of them staring jalapeños at Torrence, and Torrence ready to lay 10-plus seconds of heartburn on them. The only things missing will be the butcher knives. "I know one thing," says Dorothy Torrence. "People give Gwen a hard time, it just makes her run faster."
Gwen has a gorgeous six-year-old boy, Little Man (short for Manley), but for some reason the time he comes home from school is the time she gets up from in front of the television set and goes to do her grueling workout. So Dorothy drives over and babysits Little Man and then, around five, takes him over to her house, where she makes dinner for Gwen and Manley and their boy.
Maybe someday, when Gwen retires and leaves the vogue-a-thon, she and Little Man will sort of grow up together. Maybe she can get that little hairdressing shop. And maybe everybody she sees won't be the next attacker, the next threat, the next cheater. And maybe she will see Ottey at a parade somewhere or Cuthbert at the mall, and they will get close enough to explain, and she will finally understand. After all, how long can you keep coming at the world head down, arms flying, eyes closed?
Of course, you do not need to take a Dale Carnegie seminar to be a great sprinter. You need speed, and you need stubbornness. Torrence has gobs of both. When she went home to Decatur from college in the summers, she would work twice as hard as any of the football players who hung around town. "You'd always see her running -- in the gym, outside, anywhere," says Henry Harris, a high school and college teammate of Fred Lane's. "You'd see her in the hottest part of the day training on the track, and then you'd see her training later that afternoon. And we'd go, 'Damn, Gwen's goin' somewhere.'"
The first place she went after college was the world track and field circuit, where she has left some indelible spike marks. Since 1990 she has won more world-championship and Olympic medals than any other athlete in her sport. During one three-year stretch she won 49 straight races. She has also made more enemies than most people have socks.
Torrence sees a lot of cheaters in her sport, and if there was one thing her mama taught her to hate, it was cheaters. All Dorothy had to do was look out her window and point at the dope sellers on the street. "You see that?" she would say to Gwen. "That's not right." Anybody who lied or cheated in Dorothy's house got the belt.
Right out of the chute, 1991: Torrence goes to the World Championships in Tokyo and wins two silvers; both golds go to Germany's Katrin Krabbe. Only who should fail a drug test later? Krabbe. Did they give Torrence Krabbe's two golds the way they gave a gold to Carl Lewis when Ben Johnson proved to have been juiced up at the Seoul Olympics? No. (Krabbe did not test positive until after the World Championships.) A lousy start to things.
And then there is the personal piano Torrence carries on her back: Florence Griffith Joyner. Don't get Gwen started on Flo-Jo. Since the summer of 1988, when Flo-Jo crushed the world record in the 100 (with that time of 10.49) on a windy day in Indianapolis in July and added the 200 record (21.34 seconds) in Seoul two months later, no female sprinter has come anywhere near her marks. They are so far out of reach that track magazines refer to "the non-Flo-Jo mark of 10.76" when talking about the world record. Do you know that the wind-gauge reading on every other race that day in Indianapolis was never less than 3-point-something meters per second? (Anything over 2.0 invalidates a world record.) That the readings before Flo-Jo's record and after it were 4-point-something? But for the record itself the gauge read 0.0? "C'mon!" says Torrence. "My heat was 5.0, and I ran 10.78."
And what of the whispering about Flo-Jo's using steroids -- allegations that have never been proved? "Anybody in their right mind has to wonder," says Torrence. "There's no way -- no way! -- she went from a [personal best of] 10.9 to 10.49. And a 21.9 to 21.3? It doesn't happen that way. When Ben Johnson came back clean, he was running 10.44. That means she could've beaten Ben! Florence has always been gorgeous, but I felt like there was a physical change in her in '88. Now I see her, she has a softer look. You can say she's not training hard anymore, but facial structure doesn't change like that. It's not the same look she had."
And then there is this little thing inside Torrence that won't let her take losing all that well. She does not lose often, but when she does, something always seems to divert attention from the losing: a knee injury, fatigue or not having trained to peak for the meet. At the '92 Olympics, after she didn't win a medal in the 100, which she was expected to do, she blurted out to reporters that two of the three medalists were "dirty." The medalists were Gail Devers of the U.S. (gold), Juliet Cuthbert of Jamaica (silver) and Irina Privalova of Russia (bronze). Torrence offered no evidence for her charge. Except for creating an international incident and branding Torrence as a sore loser, the accusation went over quite well.
"Gwen Torrence can kiss my ass," Bob Kersee, Devers's coach, said by way of a denial. Cuthbert wanted to fight Torrence the next day on the infield. "My mother read what Gwen said about me in Barcelona," Cuthbert says. "My mother said, 'Drugs? My girl's on drugs?' I had to call her and tell her it wasn't true." Writers crucified Torrence for pointing the finger without proof. But why, Torrence wondered, did everybody go mental? To her, these cheaters were just getting what they deserved, which was the belt.
"I was gonna try to get control of the drug problem some kind of way," Torrence says now. "I was hoping I would win and the message would've come across better. What bothered me was that people came up to me afterward and said, 'This wasn't the place or the time.' And I'm like, 'Why are you guys afraid? You know there's a problem.'"
What was more amazing was that Torrence came back and won the Olympic 200 five days later, with torrents of rage aimed at her by the world's sprinters and track press. Talk about stubborn.
"I looked at myself in the mirror, and I kissed myself on both shoulders," Torrence says about those days in Barcelona. "I knew I had done nothing wrong. When track is all over for me, I want to still have my kidneys and my liver. I don't want to develop some disease because I wanted to win a race."
It is good that Torrence likes herself, because she is about as popular on the women's track scene as bunions. "Nobody likes her," says Cuthbert. "Nobody on her own team likes her! She's the biggest bitch in track. I'd like to kick Gwen's butt, I swear. If she says one more thing to me, I will."
If this sounds childish, it's because childishness is at the heart of the 100-meter event. Every little girl sprinted on field day in kindergarten; the winner got a blue ribbon. Then the girls all went on to other things. But sprinters somehow became defined by their talent. The faster you were, the slower you got to walk, the more daring you got to dress. And since the race takes only 11 seconds, the competition among sprinters seems to stretch out in other, odd ways. Cuthbert and Torrence, for instance, seem to have a vogue-a-thon going, with Cuthbert ahead right now in Skimpiest Leotard and Torrence way ahead in Coolest Hair Weaves. ("This one I've got on right now?" Torrence says. "Three hundred fifty dollars.") It's pretty much a dead heat in Vicious Quotes.
None of that gets to Torrence. But last summer something got to her. At the World Championships in Göteborg she was disqualified in the 200, which she won by four meters, for stepping out of her lane. When the DQ was announced, there were cheers from the Jamaican team and delegation, including second-place finisher Merlene Ottey, then Torrence's idol, who was declared the winner and who then ripped Torrence in a press conference. That made Torrence cry. She is a crier anyway. She cries over Little House on the Prairie. You should have seen her dissolve in tears on the victory stand in Barcelona at the playing of the national anthem after her victory in the 200. But the '95 worlds were one of the few occasions she let the poisons of the track world get to her tear ducts. "Merlene called me a cheater," Torrence says. "That hurt me inside."
But she has had time to think about the Jamaicans and all the other people who would love to see her fall on the bottom of her USA racing skin this summer in Atlanta. "My preacher said something in church the other day," Torrence says. "He said, 'How can a person like you when they don't like themselves?' When somebody has no reason on this earth to dislike me, they must dislike themselves."
Torrence is trying to be more careful these days, trying to think things out before she speaks to reporters, trying to bite her lip and unball her fists before proceeding. "She's just now learning how to control herself, to not let her background creep up like a monster, like an evil twin," says Davis. "Because one side of Gwen is really great, and the other side is an awful person."
The problem is, Ms. Awful Person gets most of the press. "Oh, yeah, the media love that type of stuff," Torrence says, staring at Danny! (special guest: Divine Brown). "They have an obsession with the bad. I'm sorry I'm not this bad person people want me to be. I'm a much better person." And if she had to go on one of those talk shows to tell her side of the story? "Oprah," she says. "Definitely Oprah." ("Widely Hated Track Divas.")
All of this is what makes Torrence the Reluctant Olympic Heroine. But look at it from her side. If you had a brother who could not run, could not walk, could use only his wrists, neck and head, would you want the world to make a big deal out of how fast you make it from one end of a football field to the other?
Charles Torrence -- CT, everybody calls him -- is 47 now and weighs maybe 110 pounds. He has been paralyzed for 24 years, since Gwen was six. Next to his home hospital bed in a Decatur apartment that he keeps mostly dark are stacks of videotapes, almost all of races that Gwen has run. "I'm probably her biggest fan," Charles says, his head back on the pillow. Yet he has seen her run live as a professional only once -- at the 1995 Mobil/USA Indoor Championships in Atlanta, where she won the 60. Charles doesn't get to see Gwen much when she's not competing, either. ("She's so busy," he says.) He hears that the house she lives in is really something, but he hasn't been in it. He is looking forward to the Olympics, only he doesn't have a ticket yet. "Maybe if you write it in your magazine, somebody will send me one," he says.
He really ought to go, because this is fixing to be one delicious 100: Cuthbert, Ottey, Privalova, all of them staring jalapeños at Torrence, and Torrence ready to lay 10-plus seconds of heartburn on them. The only things missing will be the butcher knives. "I know one thing," says Dorothy Torrence. "People give Gwen a hard time, it just makes her run faster."
Gwen has a gorgeous six-year-old boy, Little Man (short for Manley), but for some reason the time he comes home from school is the time she gets up from in front of the television set and goes to do her grueling workout. So Dorothy drives over and babysits Little Man and then, around five, takes him over to her house, where she makes dinner for Gwen and Manley and their boy.
Maybe someday, when Gwen retires and leaves the vogue-a-thon, she and Little Man will sort of grow up together. Maybe she can get that little hairdressing shop. And maybe everybody she sees won't be the next attacker, the next threat, the next cheater. And maybe she will see Ottey at a parade somewhere or Cuthbert at the mall, and they will get close enough to explain, and she will finally understand. After all, how long can you keep coming at the world head down, arms flying, eyes closed?