States of Grace

Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and strength.
They know how to swim, row, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves.
They are ultimate in their own right – they are calm, clear, well-possess’d of themselves.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Although the women on these pages are undeniably beautiful, they have never asked the world to think of them that way. Standing in front of a sweeping gray canvas, they occupy their bodies with an ease and intimacy seen only in people who spend a great deal of their time going flat-out. Their sense of themselves may be largely physical, but it has little to do with the effect they have on others. They are athletes, not models.

In fact, they are eight of the best athletes in the world, women who can outrun and outjump and outride all rivals. They are sprinters and marathoners, tumblers and climbers, warriors and magicians. Five are already aiming for spots on the ’96 American Olympic Team, three in events that will be available to women for the first time.

Whether seasoned pros or teenage students, they are full-time athletes, and they look it. They possess broad shoulders and strong backs, thickly muscled legs and well-defined arms. The 125-pound Gail Devers, who magnificently tumescent thighs and heart-shaped calves are among walking wonders of the world, can squat 400 pounds. Camille Duvall-Hero, who has the smoothly inflated lines of a comic-book superhero, can deadlift 215. Even the 4’11” gymnast Dominique Dawes, who confesses in a tiny Michael Jackson voice to having recently let her weight balloon from 88 to 92 pounds, is ripped.

These are formidable characters, ambitious as Rhodes scholars. When they step into the small room at the back of the studio to be interviewed, their stories of burnout and revival, loneliness and injury, are full of absurd sacrifices and headstrong stubbornness. Almost all of the women describe a crucial moment when they realized that natural talent would take them only so far, and that if they wanted to compete at the highest level they would have to up the ante. That was the day they decided to drop out of school or quit their job, to start lifting weights or move in with their coach, to turn pro or live off their credit cards.

When Gail Devers won the gold medal for the 100-meter sprint at the Barcelona Olympics, it came with the designation “world’s fastest woman,” a title that, Devers concedes with a smile, has a wonderful ring to it. All these women are chasing comparable glories and, caught up in that heady sense of mission, no price seems too steep.

Dawes, a 17-year-old high school senior, seconds 40 hours a week in a gym and hasn’t lived at home in years. Equestrienne Gabrielle Salik recalls that, over one rocky six-month stretch, she fell off her horse every day and was frequently knocked out cold. If Duvall-Hero were to stumble out of her water skis as she whipped back across the wake at 70 miles an hour and collide with her takeoff ramp, she might pay the same absolute price as Austrian downhiller Ulrike Maier, killed this winter when she fell during a race. But the 33-year-old mother wants to set two more world records before she’s through.

A glance at their medical charts refutes the automatic association between exercise and health. Liz Masakayan, who has a 33” vertical leap and is widely considered the most versatile volleyball player ever, says her first sensation upon waking is the pain in her knees, which have been operated on three times. The statuesque Duvall-Hero has had five operations – three on one shoulder, one on each knee. Dawes has tendinitis in both ankles, and fencer Sharon Monplaisir just got off crutches. When they speak of their bodies, it’s not with vanity but with the gratitude and loyalty one reserves for certain banged-up old cars. “I’ve got a lot more miles on me than most people my age,” says the 29-year-old Masakayan.

These women are pioneers as much as athletes. As young girls they competed almost exclusively against boys. Later they were among the first to benefit from Title IX – the athletic version of the civil rights amendment – which requires publicly funded schools to provide sports opportunities for girls equivalent to those for boys.

In many cases they are also the first women in their sports to be able to make a living for athletes – certainly the first with a shot at serious money. Just about every woman photographed here is getting paid to use or wear something. Two arrive at the shoot in large European sedans. Others come with agents, managers, or reps from their sponsors.

Most important, they are part of the first generation of women comfortable with their own hardcore competitiveness. They don’t believe that an overwhelming desire to grind their opponents into dust implies a lack of femininity or anything else for that matter. These eight have tested themselves enough to know that except for endorsement contracts, sports has nothing to do with sex. In a way that only competitors can, they understand than an athlete is an athlete is an athlete.