FIVE TIMES A CHARM

Chris Rosenblum

If Olympic trips were playing cards, Gene Wettstone would have a winning hand.

CDT/Nabil K. Mark

Gene Wettstone, 95, coached the 1948 and 1956 United States Olympics Gymnastics teams. He also was the Olympic team manager in 1976 and an Olympic judge in 1952 and 1968. CDT/Nabil K. Mark

Wettstone, the 95-year-old former Penn State men’s gymnastics coach, participated in five Olympic Games as a coach, judge and team manager. His first, in 1948, came nine years after he took over the Nittany Lions and the last occurred in 1976, the year of his retirement. Not that he has much to show for them.

“It was a terrific honor,” he said in his Foxdale Village apartment. “You got suits, you got hats, you got Olympic seals all over you. But all my kids stole those suits from me. Everyone grabbed them ... And I gave away a lot of things to people I liked.” He did keep his memories.

For the London Games in 1948, he coached the men’s gymnastics team. World War II had ended three years before, and England was still recovering.

“Every nation had to bring their own equipment, because London didn’t have enough,” Wettstone said. “In those days, it was very heavy.”

Another inconvenience was the voyage over, five frustrating days at sea.

“We tried to train on the boat, but the fact that it went up and down and back and forth didn’t allow us to even do a handstand on the parallel bars because, all of a sudden, it threw you off to the side,” he said.

In London, Wettstone met the champion German gymnast, Helmut Bantz, who had been interned in England during the war. A small gift cemented their lifelong friendship.

“England didn’t have any soap, and he hadn’t seen a piece of soap in years,” Wettstone said. “It just so happened I took a box from Rec Hall (at Penn State) and I gave him that, and that guy just about flipped.”

Though the Games lacked certain amenities — the U.S. team flew in bread — they provided a surprise in gymnastics. The Finnish team claimed the most gold

medals and won the overall competition, an emotional moment for Wettstone.

“It was sort of a reminder that they had had a big battle with the Soviet Union on skis a few years before, and they lost half of their male population,” Wettstone said. “And here they go to the Olympic games, and they win the gymnastics. They were really tough. I thought it was a wonderful tribute to them.”

Finland went from champions to hosts in 1952. In Helsinki, Wettstone watched Penn State star Horace Ashenfelter stun the track world by entering his first steeplechase race and beating the favored Russian for the gold.

“It was a big shock,” Wettstone said. “For the United States, it was a tremendous victory.”

In 1956, at the Games in Melbourne, Australia, the Russians played even more of a role in Wettstone’s Olympic experience.

That year, the Soviet Union had forcibly quashed an uprising in Hungary. The U.S. gymnasts helped their Hungarian counterparts defect, stashing them away in the athletes’ village.

“We thought it would be a difficult thing,” Wettstone said. “See, the Russians kept to themselves in an area that we couldn’t even find them. We couldn’t even make friendships with them.

“All their teams had a guard that guarded them so they wouldn’t run away. The Hungarians, the last few days in our little house we were hiding all their gymnasts, underneath beds, thinking (Russians) would come around. They never came.”

Cold War tensions also colored the judging, Wettstone said. Previous postwar Olympics had aroused suspicion, and that year allayed nobody’s concerns.

“The judging was still horrible,” Wettstone said. “A Swedish interpreter I was friendly with told me all the (Eastern bloc) nations and Russia held their own meetings. And it got so that, through the secret meetings, the judges were in cahoots with each other.”

His next Olympics brought him to Mexico City. He served as a gymnastics judge, but his lasting memory of the 1968 Games was of a track event — Russian Victor Saneyev’s world-record triple jump in the thin air.

Eight years later, after winning his ninth collegiate championship, Wettstone managed the U.S. men’s gymnastics team in Montreal. By then, east-west relations had thawed, and the athletes mingled and ate in the same apartment complex.

Wettstone gave the arrangement high marks.

“It was a brilliant idea,” he said. “Everybody was together.”

Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.