In July of 1998 the 4th edition of the Goodwill Games was being held in New York, on Long Island the gymnastics competition was well underway having completed an All Around competition for both men and women and they were about to start the first day of event finals. The Goodwill Games was the highest profile event on the international gymnastics calendar that year and included substantial prize money for some events drawing quite a good field.
Among the vaulters was a sixteen year old veteran of the Chinese national team, Sang Lan. During warmup, before the television cameras were turned on, she landed badly on the mat causing a spinal injury that would leave her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Jack Carter (in 2022 under a safe sport restriction for no unsupervised contact with minors), coach of American gymnast Kristen Maloney was video taping from the stands waiting for his athletes events later in the night and caught the incident on tape. He would resist giving the tape to television producers who hounded him for it, only showing it to her doctors and then eventually deleting the tape. He had met Sang Lan on previous visits to the United States and did not want her family to have to see the footage.
A lot of rumors and and misinformation about this incident have followed it’s retelling and it’s worth relating things as best we know them:
This is Jack Carter’s description:
He said the videotape reveals that the gymnast overran the springboard and hit it on the end, her left foot in front of her right. "She knows she's going to miss the board and she starts to tuck. She hits the horse in tucked shape and rolls forward off horse, with her head looking up at the lights," Carter said. "I think she lost spatial orientation; she didn't know where she was. All she had to do was get into straight body shape or tuck in and she would have been safe, but I don't think she knew and she did nothing. She took a straight shot."
Sang Lan herself would claim that that Romanian coach Octavian Bellu moved a mat in her way distracting her in the air. The Chinese team officials claimed she was mistaken and most sources will default to describing this as “a coach from another team.” Most likely because video from the day shows that Bellu wasn’t near the mat when she vaulted so her recollection that it was him could not be correct. Some have speculated because he was one of the first to get to her after the fall that may have caused the confusion.
If there was a coach or event staffer who caused her distraction I don’t know that we’ll ever know and given that we know her version of events is flawed I don’t think it can be taken as fact either. That said the Goodwill Games was not an event put on by people who normally put on large multisport games despite this being it’s 4th edition. Poor organization or event management could very well have contributed. It’s also worth thinking about the fact that either the Chinese team or her lawyers could have played up the distraction story to help the lawsuit and to avoid the story becoming a cautionary tale about poor training (as Julissa Gomez’s 1988 death has become about her coaches).
In 2011 she would sue the Goodwill Games organizers and USA Gymanstics for $1.8 billion claiming that Time Warner (the parent company of the by then defunct Goodwill Games) and USAG had failed to deliver on promises to pay her medical bills. As the story is often told in gymternet fan circles the case took a very long time to settle. This is untrue. She filed suit in April of 2011 and the settlement (for $10 million) was reached under 3 months later.
Many gymnastics fans mistakenly believe that this incident led to the replacement of the old horse with the safer re-designed vaulting table. In fact the FIG had ordered a redesign of the vault five years before (likely because of the Julissa Gomez tragedy in 1988) and the first protypes of the vaulting table were already in limited testing at the time of this accident. It is also generally believed that liability from this accident caused the end of the Goodwill Games but that is also not true purely based on timing. The lawsuit was not filed until more than a decade after the last Goodwill Games was held in 2001 and they were likely ended because they were a pet project of Ted Turner and once he was no longer in a controlling interest in the company his successors saw it as an expensive vanity project.
Sang Lan has married, become a mother, and is an advocate for those with disabilities in China today.
I leave you with her floor routine from 1998:
