Kerri Strug Biography

The American gymnast Kerri Strug was born in 1977 in Arizona. Strug rose to instant fame during the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, when she completed a victorious vault even after a severe injury to her ankle. Strug collapsed after the perfectly executed feat, and was carried away by her coach, Bela Karolyi, to the incessant cheering from the crowd. The moment is still one of the greatest in American Olympic history.

Strug grew up in Tucson, and began her training as a gymnast when she was barely four years old. By the time she was eight, she was already competing and training under the tutelage of noted coach Jim Gault, until she moved to Houston and began training with Bela Karolyi. Her first Olympic victory came when she was only fourteen years old, the youngest member of the team, with a bronze medal in Barcelona during the 1992 Olympics. Between 1992 and 1996 Kerri continued to train for the 1996 Olympics, when she was accepted onto the gymnastics team referred to today as the Magnificent Seven.

After the incident a the vault, Kerri Strug became a national sports hero. For the next year, her likeness graced the cover of such magazines as Sports Illustrated and she made a number of appearances on a variety of talk shows and even appeared on Saturday Night Live. Strug went on to perform with Disney’s World on Ice and the Ice Capades, but retired from competition to pursue her college studies, first at UCLA and then at Stanford University.

Following graduation, Kerri Strug entered first the teaching profession, and then became a staff assistant at the U.S. Office of Presidential Student Correspondence. In 2005, she became a presidential appointee to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Strug’s last appearance in connection to gymnastics was as a commentator for the Summer Olympics in Athens, in 2004.