Goldengirl

Now, just weeks from the Games, has emerged a threat to Ursula’s ten-year plan. It happened in the most unlikely way. Last winter, while Ursula was grinding out her four-hour schedule of sprint training and weightlifting in one of Berlin’s newest indoor sportsdromes, a retired California professor was urging his daughter to take up some physical activity. ‘It’s not good for an eighteen-year-old to spend all her time around the house,’ Bill Serafin told blond Goldine. ‘You should try getting some exercise. Like jogging.’

To please her pa, Goldine put on some sneakers and took a turn around the Bakersfield block where they live. She didn’t easily identify as one of the Jogging Generation, so her progress was brisker than gurus of the jog would recommend for a maiden run. She stretched her legs and went. And she enjoyed it. ‘This could be fun,’ she told her father when she got home. ‘But I’d like to run on a track, not around the block.’

Next afternoon, Goldine made a circuit of the Bakersfield College Stadium. And another. At the end of the week she tried a 100-metre dash. Someone nearby was holding a stopwatch. ‘Get a coach for that kid, and she could run the Olympics,’ he told Prof Serafin.

So they did. They hired Pete Klugman, former coach to the U.S. Olympic squad. ‘Soon as I saw Goldine, I knew she was a natural,’ says Klugman. ‘She had everything: stride length, style and basic speed. All I had to teach her was technique.’

He had seven months for that. In East Germany, Goldine’s gift for running would have been spotted in junior school, shaped and honed to perfection over years. Track in America is a more haphazard affair. Prompted by Klugman, Goldine decided to go for broke on the Olympics, training in secret, with the U.S. Trials in July as a deadline. She had just one competitive outing before that, at a San Diego club meet. She won the 100, 200 and 400 metres in top-class times. Experts who had never heard of Goldine Serafin queried the timekeeping.

At the Trials in Eugene last month, the Bakersfield blonde posted her challenge to Ursula Krüll, setting new U.S. records in Ursula’s pet events, the 100 and 200 metres. For the hell of it, she also entered and qualified for the Olympic team in the 400 metres, finishing third. No U.S. girl has ever run all three sprint events at one Games.