AS THE PAN AM Games wind down to their conclusion this week in Havana the drama is to see if the United States can overtake the host nation, Cuba, in the gold medal race. Meanwhile, here in Utah, Denise Parker knows that she did her part. And she's got the five gold medals to prove it.
While some American athletes have claimed that the playing fields in Havana haven't been exactly level; that competing in Cuba is worse than playing in the Boston Garden, Parker isn't one of them. It turned out that in her sport of archery, the venue didn't matter."There are archers in Cuba," says Denise, "But they weren't exactly our major competition. We pretty much should have beaten them even if we were dying."
The Pan Am archery wasn't held in Havana, where Fidel Castro had a courtside seat, but in Santiago on the sleepier side of the island. Unbothered by overt pressures, Denise won the women's individual archery competition and was on the winning U.S. women's team. She got two gold medals for that, and she won additional gold medals for placing first in individual rounds at distances of 30 meters, 60 meters and 70 meters. Also, she got a silver medal at 50 meters.
She brought those medals home to South Jordan to add to her extensive Summer of `91 collection that also includes medals and trophies from triumphs at the Junior World Championships, the U.S. National Championships, in addition to winning the trials for the Junior Worlds and the Pan Am Games.
All that remains before Denise begins her senior year at Bingham High School this fall is a trip to Krakow, Poland, for the World Championships. She left today, after a two-day home break to get the jetlag from Cuba out of her system, and will begin competing in Krakow this weekend.
She will not be the odds-on favorite to win the individual gold medal in Krakow - as she was last month at the Junior Worlds (18-and-under) in Norway - but she'll be one of the two or three archers given at least a chance at out-shooting Kim Soo Nyung, the South Korean who won the gold medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympics."If I shoot extremely well I can give her a run," says Denise. "If I can just shoot well, I should be able to medal."
The competition in Krakow will not only decide the 1991 world champions, but also identify those most-likely-to-medal at the Olympic Games in Barcelona a year from now.
"It's the Koreans that I worry about the most," says Denise, remembering the last Olympic Games and the Koreans' domination in their home country - in sharp contrast to what happened this past week in Cuba.
As opposed to boxing, baseball and track and field, archery is not among Cuba's sports passions.
For the archers, hometown crowds were not a major Pan Am distraction.
"In other sports, the resentment toward Americans was very strong," says Denise. "We went to some of the softball and the gymnastics and every time the U.S. wouldn't do well you would hear the biggest cheer. If we did something good, there was silence. Then when the Cubans competed, the whole place would just go crazy."
The much-publicized living conditions for the Pan Am athletes - no seats for the toilets, sparse meals, crowded dormitories - that sent some of the teams, the U.S. men's basketball team, for instance, to Miami for relief, weren't so bad, says Denise, if you looked at them in relation to the overall condition of the country.
"Compared to the standard of living I saw for most Cubans," she says, "we lived in luxury. It's hard for me to knock what they gave us. They're starving and rationing their food, and then they had to cut down their food even more just for us. Our food wasn't great but how can you expect to get anything better when they didn't have it to give?
"I think they were very interested in seeing Americans, as much as the Americans were interested in seeing them," she says. "They wanted to see our blond hair and blue eyes and we wanted to see what they look like. We've both been isolated from each other."
This week in Poland, she and her five gold medals will be in a country not long out of isolation itself. Shooting straight arrows is getting Utah's most famous archer a lot of places she never expected to go.