The Fastest Chair in Town - Transcript
[Cheri Becerra]
They don’t know. They say it’s an unknown virus that went through my system. Said one in a million it happens to and... You know, doctors just say, well you look like a normal little four-year-old that should be walking, but you’re not. So the way I look at it now I must be... You know God must have a reason...
[Narrator]
Cheri trains six days a week, determined in her quest to become one of the world’s elite wheelchair athletes.
The National Wheelchair Athletic Association designated Cheri a T-4, a medical classification that defines her level of muscular function -- completely paralyzed from the waist down. Her training is designed to make the most of Cheri’s body structure -- broad shoulders and long arms. And build her cardiovascular endurance to sprint away from the starting line and sustain her through a rush of speed at the finish line.
[Mary Becerra]
When the racing came up we kind of like all sat down and we talked about it. All the family, everybody played a part in what Cheri’s done. You know, it wasn’t just Mom, just wasn’t Dad, it wasn’t Grandma. It was all of us...
[Narrator]
By May of 1996, less than three months from Atlanta, Cheri’s performance was less than stellar at a regional meet in San Diego, California. She had been racing only two years, breaking and setting new records.
Cheri was intent on pushing herself and her racer toward the U.S. Trials in June of 1996. And three gold medals in the 100, 200, and 400 meter sprints in the Para-Olympic games, the premiere event for athletes with physical disabilities scheduled just two weeks after the able bodied Olympics in Atlanta.
Cheri’s trip to the U.S. Para-Olympic Trials in Atlanta would be more rewarding. Here her training, her records, and her confidence paid off. Her vision... to qualify for not only the Para-Olympics but the International Trials in Paris where she had a shot at joining Team U.S.A. for the Olympics in Atlanta.
[Announcer]
The qualifying participants from this event will then go to Paris to compete in the competition, which then selects the eight participants, which will compete during the Olympic Games.
[Mary Becerra]
Is she going to do it? [She did it!] She did it... she won?!!
[Announcer]
Number Four is our winner. Cheri Becerra.
[Narrator]
When Cheri and Mary departed from Omaha, Nebraska for Paris, France early one morning in July of 1996, they had already come a long way.
With only two years on the racing circuit they had dreamed of the year 2000 and the summer games in Sydney, Australia. Against all odds they were four years ahead of schedule. Together they faced another eight hundred-meter competition. The last stop before the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
[Mary Becerra]
They’re having the Olympics here in Atlanta... and they’re sending us over to France.
[Narrator]
At the Federation Francois Handisport, the training center for disabled athletes, the surroundings were more familiar. Cheri and Mary spent each day getting ready for the International Trials under the guidance of U.S. Coach Marty Morris from the University of Illinois, himself a wheelchair athlete.
[Marty Morris]
Hold your lane all the way to when you see the green and then go. Don’t drift out wide or anything like that because they will touch you about that over here. A previous award-winner in Barcelona and they took it away from her for cutting in about a half an inch early.
[Announcer]
... la American, Cheri Becerra.
[Narrator]
The international trials in Paris divided the top fifteen female competitors in the world into two heats. Cheri had already qualified for the Para-Olympic Games. But what would it take to race at the Summer Games in Atlanta.
[Marty Morris]
Like any great athlete she picked the right parents. And she’s genetically gifted I believe as a sprinter. And the big test now is can she take it to the next level?
[Narrator]
Cheri Becerra, Jean Driscoll, Leanne Shannon, Team U.S.A.
At ten a.m. on August first, 1996 Cheri and her teammates were ready for another eight hundred meters and five other world class racers including tough competition from Louise Savaunge of Australia and Connie Hanson from England.
[Cheri Becerra]
I never imagined this. I mean, I was just in high school a couple years ago and I wasn’t even thinking about wheelchair racing and I heard about this Olympic Exhibition and I was… I was, oh wouldn’t that be so cool. Maybe in year 2000 I’d be able to go to that. That would just be cool you know if I was fast by then.
I didn’t know... I didn’t expect to do this by the year 2000. My Mom thought the same way... my sponsors, I don’t think they were expecting me to go through 2000.
[Narrator]
On a wet track in Atlanta the little girl from Nebraska City who loved to ride a bike felt her heart beating to the sound of 85 thousand people as they cheered her in the pinnacle Olympic track event for wheelchair athletes. No matter what happened in the next two minutes, Cheri Becerra would make history as the first Native American woman to ever compete in the Olympic Games. And no American woman had ever won a gold medal in this event since it all began in the summer of ’84 at Los Angeles.
With one lap gone and one to go, Cheri held the lead.
At the final turn the competition was closing. With thirty meters to go Savaunge made her move. Driscoll and Shannon followed. As the finish line loomed Savaunge emerged from the pack but the medal race was not over. The eight hundred meters had come down to a battle of inches. In the end Driscoll was second and Cheri Becerra finished third. Just three tenths of a second separated the three medal winners.
But there was no sense of loss. For in the true spirit of sportsmanship for the glory of the sport, Cheri Becerra became an Olympian for all time.
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