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Not Too Old for Games

The food often gets moldy in Dominique Dawes's refrigerator. This, she will confess. She will admit, too, that the soccer posters tacked on her bedroom wall are there as much to hide the bareness as to profess her love for a sport she has no time to watch, let alone play. Her cooking tops out at omelettes and steamed rice. Mostly, she eats while watching a favored TV show -- preferably "X Files."

If Dawes -- a 1992 Olympic gymnast and a 1996 Olympic hopeful -- appears to live the life of a college student, well, then, forgive her. She is one. The former Gaithersburg High School prom queen enrolled at the University of Maryland this past academic year. Her competitive schedule may have limited her to one class this semester (it was dreaded math, and Dawes's nose wrinkles at the thought of it), but she was enrolled nonetheless.

"In Barcelona, she was just 15 years old -- a girl," said Kelli Hill, who has been as much a parent to Dawes as a coach. "She was young, she was inexperienced. She couldn't even drive a car then. The changes."

They are too many to list. This week at the U.S. Olympic trials in Boston, Dawes will attempt to qualify for her second straight Olympics -- and last professional meet. Accepted at Stanford in the spring of 1994, Dawes twice has deferred enrollment for competitive reasons. Atlanta will be her swan song. She plans to become a full-time student at Stanford in the fall.

"I've thought about it," Dawes said, "and the Olympics will be my last event."

These words, however, come at a rare moment when Dawes will admit, at least out loud, that she expects to be in Atlanta. Long hesitant to admit that she had even been planning for these Olympics, Dawes now adamantly refuses to see her qualification as a foregone conclusion.

The truth is, she is as close as there can be to a shoo-in. Her chief U.S. competitors, 1992 Olympic silver medalist Shannon Miller and 14-year-old Dominique Moceanu, are skipping the trials because of injuries, but should make the seven-person U.S. team on the strength of their performances in nationals earlier this month. That makes Dawes the easy favorite at the trials.

"Some newcomers may be getting a lot of attention," said Hill, clearly referring to the young Moceanu, the 1995 U.S. national champion and a protege of famed coach Bela Karoyli, "but if you look at the history, Dominique and Shannon Miller have proven to be the ones with the best shot."

Artistic gymnastic competition takes three forms: team, individual all-around and four individual apparatus. Based on scores from the team competition, the top 36 gymnasts (maximum of three from each country) advance to the all-around event, where they perform on each apparatus. The top eight gymnasts on each apparatus qualify for the individual finals on each apparatus.

In 1994, Dawes won the gold in the prestigious all-around competition and four individual events at the U.S. nationals, a feat not accomplished by any woman gymnast since 1969. After struggling with a stress fracture to her wrist that limited her competition in 1995, Dawes again swept the individual events at this year's nationals (which were held in Nashville this month) -- but only after she finished a disappointing sixth in the all-around competition, and after the top four finishers in that competition sat out the individual events.

"In 1995, I put too much pressure on myself," she said. "I didn't go in feeling mentally strong. I think I'm becoming a stronger athlete right now. I feel like my attitude has changed for the better, and I keep working on it. Sometimes, I go back to being negative, but i'm trying not to let that happen anymore."

It is a grown-up assessment, to go with her grown-up approach to the Atlanta Olympics. At age 15, Dawes was the first black person to represent the United States in women's gymnastics. Then, she was a girl -- young, ambitious, and more than a little bit scared. She barely can remember how she prepared for those Olympics. The competition itself was a blur.

"It was so large," Dawes said of her Olympic experience. "There were so many people in the stands cheering. It was kind of scary, but also exciting."

Now 19, she is old, at least when confined to the narrow terms of the world in which she competes. At the very least, she is an elder stateswoman, competing, as she is, for a shot at a second Olympic appearance in a sport where girls peak and then disappear when they've barely reached puberty. Not since three members of the 1980 Olympic team (who missed those Games because of the boycotted Moscow Olympics) requalified for Los Angeles in 1984 has a gymnast competed in two Olympics.

"A veteran?" Dawes said, her face screwing up with distress at the term. "I don't know . . ."

Hill does. Dawes's coach since Dominique was a precocious 6 year old, Hill may not like the term "veteran" either, but this she does know: Dominque has come a long way since Barcelona. The little girl from Silver Spring has left home. She has her own apartment, which she shares with four other Maryland students, who, despite their own grueling schedules as members of the school's track team, never seem able to catch Dawes before she sneaks out of the apartment, pre-dawn, for her early workouts. She does her own laundry. She cooks her own meals. Recently, she went shopping for a rice steamer, of all confounded things.

"I wanted to get used to living on my own while I was still close to home," said Dawes, who admitted, a bit sheepishly, that her family home in Silver Spring is barely a 10-minute drive from her College Park apartment. "I know it's not far, but I just wanted to get a feel for it."

Of course, she can still sound like a little girl. She will tell you that she likes cop shows and anything "alien-like." She will giggle and blush when asked about being prom queen. And when she says she wants to go into the "performing arts" or "criminal justice," you can't help but think she is using big words for wanting to be either an actress or a police officer -- two professions often mentioned by undecided young girls.

But she isn't a young girl, not anymore, not in this world. At a recent competition at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Dawes stood more than a head taller than a little girl behind her in line, who almost teetered on tip-toes as she chalked her hands in preparation for a turn on the uneven bars. After running through her uneven-bar workout, as well as a handful of practice runs at the vault, Dawes put on a T-shirt and shorts and sat down in a seat not far from where the young girl was stuffing a Lion King doll into her duffle bag.

"When I'm really competitive, like now, my room can be chaos," Dawes said. "Some of the food will be molding in the fridge, I won't be unpacked for the last trip . . . but my roommates, they don't mind. And if they do, I have my own room -- they can close the door."