Headline Surfer® photos / YouTube video uploads /Marcia Frederick wins the first-ever gold medal for the United States women's gymnastics team at the World Championships in Strasbourg, France in 1978, the tune-up for the 1980 Moscow Olympics. But Frederick's hopes were dashed earlier that year when President Carter announced the U.S. would boycott the Olympic Games in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The gymnast, who turns 51 on Saturday, is shown here in New Smyrna Beach in August where she was visiting her cousin, Headline Surfer® Publisher Henry Frederick.
NEW SMYRNA BEACH -- She was the first female gymnast to win a gold medal in the uneven parallel bars at the World Championships in Strasbourg, France in 1978. But for Marcia Frederick, who turns 51 today, her dreams of Olympic gold were long ago dashed when President Carter announced the U.S. was boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
"We were all very disappointed," Marcia Frederick told me when flew down here to New Smyrna Beach in August to spend a week with me and my wife, Serafina, in New Smyrna Beach before we moved to Lake Mary. "That was an opportunity of a lifetime many of us would not have a chance at and it made me angry for years. Later, I had a chance to meet the president and I refused to shake his hand."
"We were all very disappointed," Marcia Frederick told me when flew down here to New Smyrna Beach in August to spend a week with me and my wife, Serafina, in New Smyrna Beach before we moved to Lake Mary. "That was an opportunity of a lifetime many of us would not have a chance at and it made me angry for years. Later, I had a chance to meet the president and I refused to shake his hand."
And who could blame her. The little girl who was walking on her hands at the age of 2 before her parents put her in gymnastics and spent her entire childhood devoted to training for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of competing in the Olympics.
By the time the Los Angeles Olympics came around in 1984, the Soviets were the ones boycotting, but by then, age and injuries had caught up with Frederick and it was Mary Lou Retton who had won gold and getting the accolades and her face on the Wheaties cereal box.
After all, Retton, was the first American woman gymnast to win Olympic gold.
Photo for Headline Surfer® / Though she won a gold medal on the uneven parrallell brs in the World Gymnastics Championships in Strasbourg, France in 1978, American gymnast Marcia Frederick, also excelled in the floor exercises as shown here, and the vault.
Unfortunately for Marcia Frederick, politics got in the way in her dreams of Olympic competition at the Moscow Summer Games in 1980, were dashed when President Carter announced the U.S. would stay home because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Just think: Six years earlier, it was Marcia Frederick, who beat perhaps the greatest gymnast ever in Nadia Comaneci of Romania, the little darling with the perfect 10s in the 1976 Olympics. And while Frederick was in her prime, Comaneci started her decline, finishing second in Moscow in the women's all-around.
She was looking forward to competing against Comaneci in Moscow where she believed she could have duplicated her gold-winning performance.
It boggles the mind that it could have been -- should have been -- Marcia Frederick as the first American female gymnast to win gold instead of Retton, who didn't have the fierce level of competition with the subsequent boycott of the LA Games by the Soviets and the other Iron Curtain power squads like Romania and East Germany.
These days, Marcia Frederick, mother of two grown children, teaches gymnastics and is a fitness instructor at two facilities in her native Massachusetts.
So to Marcia Frederick, family member and friend and the American gold medal winner, happy 51st birthday!
Did You Know?
Here's a bit of irony between the two former competitors? It was Marcia Frederick, who beat the great Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci in head-to-head competition to win the gold medal in the uneven parallel bars at the World Gymnastics Championship in Strasbourg, France, who would play her stunt double in the 1984 made-for-Television movie, "Nadia."
YouTube video upload / for Headline Surfer® / Here is Marcia Frederick during an ABC Sports interview at the tender age of 16.