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When Dianne Durham entered the arena at the 1983 National Gymnastics Championships at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she was greeted by her own personal cheering section. Her church from her hometown of Gary, Indiana, sent two busloads of congregants to support the gymnast. “They had a big banner that said, ‘We love you Dianne,’” Durham recalled. “Then I ended up winning the meet. It was an incredible moment.”
When Durham, who was then 14, won the national title in 1983, she was not only picking up the most important domestic title of the pre-Olympic year; she had become the first African American woman to win the senior national title, after pulling off a similar feat in the junior ranks in 1981 and 1982.
You’ve probably never heard of Durham since she never made it to the Olympics. A toxic mixture of injury and politics kept her off the 1984 team that competed in Los Angeles. It was at that Olympics that Mary Lou Retton (a training partner of Durham’s) clinched the all-around gold medal and leapt onto the Wheaties box. It was Retton, not Durham, who became a household name and icon.
That the first black female American national gymnastics champion emerged in the early 80s (and the first African American Olympic female gymnast, Luci Collins, was on the 1980 team that never competed due to the boycott) may come as a surprise for the average Olympic viewer. For those who follow the sport once every four years, the story of black gymnasts probably begins with Dominique Dawes, who is most famous for being a member of the Magnificent Seven, the 1996 gold medal winning U.S. team, though she was also a member of the bronze medal winning 1992 and 2000 teams. After Dawes, black gymnastics history for most people probably skips ahead to 2012 with Gabby Douglas, the all-around champion from the London Games, and then to Simone Biles, who won the all-around at the Olympic trials on Sunday and will represent the U.S. along with Douglas, 16-year-old Laurie Hernandez, Madison Kocian and Aly Raisman in Rio.
This timeline gives the impression of a sport almost entirely bereft of black representation in the higher ranks. But if you search the years between the Olympics, you’ll find black female gymnasts winning world championship medals, dominating the national championships and filling out college team rosters for years.
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