Miller, Shannon
Mar. 10, 1977- Gymnast.

1996 Biography from Current Biography

    In the four years since she vaulted into the media spotlight at the 1992 Summer Olympic Games, in Barcelona, Spain--at which she won five medals, more than any other American athlete--Shannon Miller has remained the country's strongest competitor in gymnastics. Besides becoming the first woman from the United States to win the all-around world gymnastics championship title in two consecutive years (1993 and 1994), as of 1995 she was the nation's most decorated gymnast, with eight world championship medals since 1991, in addition to the five medals she won at the 1992 Games.
    Notwithstanding these achievements, in the months leading up to the 1996 Olympic Games, in Atlanta, many observers expressed doubts about Miller's prospects. Much of the negative speculation stemmed from her "advanced" age: though only 19 by the standard calculation, she was over 100 "in gymnastic years," as one reporter put it. Miller proved the skeptics wrong, however, when she helped the United States women's gymnastics team win a gold medal, the first-ever Olympic team gold for the American squad, and she herself took the gold on the balance beam.
    Shannon Lee Miller was born on March 10, 1977 in Rolla, Missouri, the middle child of Ron and Claudia Miller. Six months later the family moved to Edmond, Oklahoma, where her father had accepted a job as a physics professor at the University of Central Oklahoma and her mother became a vice-president of a local bank. All her family members have been in some way involved in gymnastics. In his classes, Ron Miller uses a videotape of his daughter's gymnastics routine to illustrate to his students such physical concepts as gravity, momentum, and force, and Claudia Miller is a Level 10 gymnastics judge. Shannon's younger brother, Troy, takes tumbling classes, and her sister, Tessa, has also taken gymnastics lessons.
    Miller's introduction to the sport came at about the age of five, when her parents bought a trampoline. Before long she and her sister were flipping and tumbling not only on the trampoline but in the house, too, and their parents, fearing that their two daughters "were going to kill [them]selves," as Miller put it, enrolled them in a gymnastics class at a local club. "My sister stayed a couple of years and left for other things, but I loved it," she told Carolanne Griffith-Roberts. "When I started gymnastics, I did it just for the fun of it," she told Dwight Normile for International Gymnast (March 1992).
    Miller's progress was so swift that by the time she was about nine, she had made the United States Association of Independent Gymnastics Clubs' (USAIGC) junior elite team, a springboard for young athletes aspiring to compete internationally. As part of that program, in the summer of 1986 she, together with her mother, spent two weeks at a gymnastics training camp in what was then the Soviet Union, the so-called Mecca of gymnastics. The experience was a turning point for Miller, for it was then that she realized that gymnastics was not only an activity she enjoyed but a sport she wished to master, as she told Krista Quiner, the author of the biography Shannon Miller: America's Most Decorated Gymnast (1996): "I realized [then] that it takes a lot of hard work. We worked out there a lot harder than we did at home, and I saw how good the Soviets were, and I realized then that I wanted to be that good."
    The trip was also significant in terms of Miller's career, for "that's really when Shannon was spotted," as her father recalled to Normile. "Russians came and talked to my wife and said, 'This girl, no, she needs gymnastics, high-level gymnastics.' And so that's when we switched from the local club and found Steve." Steve Nunno, a former gymnast himself and a coach who runs Dynamo Gymnastics in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, had also attended the camp and been impressed by Miller's talent. "Shannon was trying so hard and getting extremely frustrated," he has recalled, as quoted in Time (July 27, 1992). "I felt, 'There's a kid I can help if I can channel that frustration into a positive energy.'"
    Under the guidance of Nunno, who pushed her to train as hard as she could, and Peggy Liddick, Nunno's assistant and choreographer, as well as through her own hard work and sheer determination, Miller progressed rapidly. "Shannon is the hardest worker in my gym, and always has been," Nunno said, according to the Time article. But because she was the youngest member of her class, and because Nunno was forever challenging her to try moves that other coaches might have considered too advanced, in the beginning she was far from the best, and in most of her early competitions she would "always have a fall on something," as Nunno has recalled.
    "I was a breed apart," Nunno told Krista Quiner, explaining the philosophy that he brought to his role as a coach. "I didn't care whether I stuck my beam dismount. I was going to do a full-in off the beam, and if I stuck it, great; if I didn't, take the 10th. I was willing to sacrifice the 10th for the difficulty, and later on I'd polish it up.. . . That was always my philosophy. If I couldn't win with the difficulty, knowing that it was going to be high-level gymnastics--and not politics--that was going to win, then I didn't want to win." That philosophy suited Miller, who never balked when it came to trying new and more difficult routines. "She was a trickster, and I was a trickster," Nunno told Quiner. "I made sure that she was doing the big skills from day one, skills that were way beyond what she thought she could do. But she was willing to try them, so I was willing to go with it."
    While she was not a standout, Miller gave some solid performances during those early years. Her first national competition was in 1987, at the USAIGC National Gymnastics Championship at the University of Delaware in Newark, at which her team placed third, and her first major elite-level meet was the 1988 American Classic, at which she finished second in the children's division. Later in 1988, she competed in the U.S. Classic, where she won the vault, balance beam, and all-around events, victories that established her as the best gymnast in the United States in her age group.
    Because of a pulled hamstring in the spring of 1989 that went unattended for six months, Miller was in constant pain, to the extent that she considered withdrawing from competition altogether. On the advice of a trainer, and against the wishes of her coach, she stayed off the leg for two months, until Nunno, eager to see her compete in the American Cup--she was the first junior ever to have been invited to that competition--persuaded her to resume training. She ended up placing sixth in the preliminaries.
    Throughout 1990 and 1991 Miller continued to perform well. She won three events--the vault, balance beam, and floor exercise--as well as the all-around competition in the 1990 Catania Cup, in Sicily, Italy. In the following year, she won the all-around in the Arthur Gander Memorial, with a score of 39.875, and in the process broke an American record; finished third in the all-around at the Deutscher Turner Bund (DTB) Cup, in Stuttgart, Germany; shared the gold with her partner, Scott Keswick, in the Swiss Cup; and competed in both the national and world championships.
    By the time the 1992 Olympic trials rolled around, Miller had an impressive resume, but she remained relatively unknown, and most oddsmakers were placing their bets on Kim Zmeskal, the reigning world gymnastics champion and the first American ever to hold that title. The first sign that Miller might pose a major challenge to everyone's top pick came at the trials themselves, when she finished ahead of her rival, posting 79.056 points to Zmeskal's 78.96, and was thus ranked first on the United States Olympic Gymnastics Team. One who refused to acknowledge that Miller might have what it would take to edge past Zmeskal--and that she had even won the meet--was Bela Karolyi, who, in addition to Zmeskal, has coached to victory such world-class athletes as Nadia Comaneci and Mary Lou Retton. "I do not understand how you can treat the only world champion this country has ever had this way. . . ," he roared to a reporter for the Sporting News (July 20, 1992). "She finished this competition in first place. She should be the winner. It's a mysterious procedure that nobody understands."
    As it turned out, at the 1992 Olympics, held in Barcelona, Spain, Miller not only outshone all of her American teammates--including Zmeskal, who began the competition inauspiciously by falling off the balance beam, her first of the four apparatus events--but also, for a time, seemed poised to vanquish the American gymnasts' fiercest rivals, the members of the Unified Team, comprising athletes from the former Soviet Union. After stumbling on the vault, she went on to win medals in each of the three remaining apparatus events--the bronze in the uneven bars, the silver in the balance beam, and a share of the bronze in the floor exercise--becoming the only American gymnast to win an individual medal. As a member of the United States team, she also captured the team bronze (the gold went to the Unified Team), and she won the silver in the all-around, losing the gold to the Unified Team's Tatyana Gutsu by just .012 points. She was the first American gymnast to win five Olympic medals since Mary Lou Retton garnered that many at the Soviet-boycotted 1984 Games.
    In addition to her clutch of Olympic medals, Miller, whose balletic and graceful style distinguishes her from the many American gymnasts who are better known for their explosive athleticism, earned the admiration of her Russian and Ukrainian rivals. "You want to see ballet and beauty, and Miller's got the classic style of the Soviet system," the Unified Team's women's coach, Aleksandr Aleksandrov, told E. M. Swift for Sports Illustrated (August 10, 1992). "Her programs and aesthetics are the best on the U.S. team." Equally important, according to Miller, she came away from the competition with some wonderful memories. "It was everything I dreamed of and more," she told E. M. Swift in an interview for Sports Illustrated (December 14, 1992). "It was fun getting there and fun being there. I hadn't planned to keep competing until '96, but after the Olympics were over I didn't want to stop. It's so much fun."
    Upon her return to the United States, Miller suddenly found herself in the media spotlight. After making the rounds of the morning television shows, she took part in a United States Gymnastics Federation tour and then in the 1992 Tour of Olympic and World Champion Gymnasts, at which she was the main attraction. "During this fall's 23-city tour by world and Olympic stars. . . ," E. M. Swift observed in the December 14, 1992 issue of Sports Illustrated, "Miller received the loudest cheers. When the advance ticket sales were slow, Miller was the gymnast whom tour sponsors flew in to do radio and newspaper interviews." And then there were the young men "sending her their photographs. . . ," Swift continued, "or approaching her in hotel lobbies with a tentative 'Are you who I think you are?'"
    For her part, Miller enjoyed performing her routines in the absence of judges and took her sudden fame in stride. "I still go to public school," she told Swift for the December 1992 Sports Illustrated article. "I still work out, my coach still yells at me in the gym. My brother and sister still pick on me, and I still pick on them. Many of my friends have known me since I was in first grade, and they still treat me the same." Indeed, alongside her life as a world-class athlete, Miller has done her best to lead a "normal" life as a student, family member, and friend. After graduating from Edmond North Mid High, where she was an honors student, in 1995, she enrolled at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.
    Miller followed up her Olympic victories with a first-place finish in the 1993 American Cup, in Orlando, Florida, but her main goal for the year was to win the all-around competition at the 1993 world championships, held in Birmingham, England. Because of a new scoring system requiring new degree-of-difficulty moves, Peggy Liddick had come up with a stunt for the beam routine that came to be known as "the Miller." "Peggy dreamed it one night," Miller told Krista Quiner, "and she came in the gym the next day and said, 'Let's try this.' So I tried it, and it worked out pretty well." The move, which consists of a back handspring with a quarter twist to a handstand with another half twist, was rated by the judges as an "E," or the highest level of difficulty.
    Though Miller ended up scoring poorly on the beam, her performances in the other apparatus events were solid, and she squeaked past her competitors to take the 1993 all-around world gymnastics championship title by .007 points--or "a James Bond," as Steve Nunno later put it. She thus became the second American, after Kim Zmeskal, to win the world championship all-around title. Following the all-around, there were still two more days of competition to go. Of the three events in which Miller competed--beam, uneven bars, and the floor exercise--she took the gold in the last-named two. Her total of three gold medals was the most ever won by an American gymnast at a world or Olympic competition. Another high point of 1993 was her performance at the United States Olympic Sports Festival, where, in addition to winning one silver and four gold medals, one of the latter in the all-around, she set festival records in three events. Then, in late August 1993, she captured her first national title, taking three golds at the national championships.
    After considering withdrawing from competition, Miller began 1994 with a renewed commitment to both holding onto her world title and competing in the 1996 Olympic Games. She achieved the first of those two goals in April, when--despite suffering from a pulled stomach muscle and shin splints--she won the all-around and a second gold on the beam at the world gymnastic championships in Brisbane, Australia. "It meant a lot to win last year because it was my first time," she was quoted as saying in the New York Times (April 23, 1994), "but this means even more because I had to come back from injuries."
    Throughout the rest of 1994 and 1995, Miller continued to compete but was ever-mindful of pacing herself so that she would be at her peak for the 1996 Games. After she lost the 1994 national championships to Dominique Dawes, finished poorly at the 1995 American Cup, came in second at the 1995 nationals, and then failed to hold onto her world title in Sabae, Japan, observers began to speculate that she might be losing her edge, especially against a new crop of younger--and smaller--rivals. Standing five inches taller in 1996 than her 1992 height of four feet, seven inches, she had by then added 28 pounds to her weight, which hovered around 100 pounds.
    Demonstrating that her relatively advanced age could be an asset, Shannon Miller displayed a new maturity and grace in her routines in 1996. "Shannon has an immense gift," Peggy Liddick has said. "She knows how to control her nerves." At the national championships in Knoxville, Tennessee, held in June 1996, Miller won the all-around title with a score of 78.380. But she did not participate in the Olympic trials later that summer because of tendinitis in her left wrist; the 14-year-old American gymnast Dominique Moceanu also petitioned to stay out of the trials, due to a stress fracture in her right tibia. Both gymnasts, however, made the seven-member American team on the strength of their records. At the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the American women won their first team gold medal ever on July 23 with a score of 389.225. On the previous day, after the women's compulsories, it was reported that Miller had contributed more points to her team (scoring no lower than a 9.737) than any other gymnast except Lilia Podkopayeva of Ukraine, who went on to win the all-around on July 25. In addition to her gold medal in the team competition, Miller won her first individual Olympic gold, on the balance beam, with a score of 9.862. When contemplating her future, she has expressed a desire to pursue a career in sports medicine, marry, and have children.

References:

Selected Biographical References: Current Science p8+ O 30 '92 por; International Gymnast p25+ Mr '92 pors; N Y Times C p8 Jl 27 '92, B p13+ D 16 '94 pors; Southern Living p28+ S '95 pors; Sporting N pS12+ Jl 20 '92 por; Sports Illustrated p76+ Ag 10 '92 por, p70+ D 14 '92 por, p46 Ap 26 '93 por; Time p56+ Jl 27 '92 pors; Quiner, Krista. Shannon Miller: America's Most Decorated Gymnast (1996)

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