Still, it was a decision which didn’t sit right with Jackie Berube, the women’s national champion at 58 kilograms (128 pounds). At just 5 feet, the blonde, pony-tailed, 29-year-old is an athletic dynamo. She is a former college gymnast who switched to wrestling and won a national championship as well as a silver medal in the 1996 world wrestling championships. In 1998, Berube switched again and started competing in weightlifting. This year, she won the gold medal at the national championships, setting an American record with a clean and jerk of 113 kilograms, or just under 250 pounds.
Berube (pronounced “Burbee”) has her heart set on the 2004 Olympics in Athens and considers the world championships a vital proving ground toward fulfilling that goal. “I trained for more than two years to make this team,” says Berube, one of some 140 Olympic aspirants employed by Home Depot, which pays them full-time wages for part-time jobs in order to accommodate their demanding training schedules. “I worked so hard for this day that I couldn’t just give it up and wait another year.”
Indeed the more she thought about it, the more impossible that notion seemed. So Berube decided not to wait. She would go to the worlds herself, paying her own way–almost $3,000–to Turkey without her coach, family or friends. In doing so, she became the first athlete to, in effect, defy a national federation decision not to compete. When the championships opened this past weekend in the resort town of Antalya, Berube marched into the arena carrying the stars and stripes, the sole American participant along with 500 athletes from some 70 nations. “I thought I was a good choice to carry the flag,” she joked in a telephone conversation from her hotel room, overlooking the Mediterranean. “Because either I carried the flag or nobody carried it.”
There was more than just personal ambition driving Berube’s decision. She believes that she is, in fact, complying with the explicit wishes of the U.S. government for a return to normalcy by its citizens. “Even our president said, ‘You should go on with your life as normal as possible,” says Berube, a Michigan native who lives in Colorado Springs where she trains at the U.S. Olympic Training Center. “I didn’t want to sit home and be afraid. I don’t think we Americans should be afraid.”
Berube traveled by way of Frankfurt, Germany and the only concession she made to the extraordinary times was her decision not to wear any USA team gear. Once she reached Antalya, several hundred miles west of Syria, she planned to “lay low.” But the whole community has been so welcoming that, she thinks, America missed a great opportunity to improve its image in a vital part of the world. “I’m not sure the people who make the decisions really know what the impact is,” she said, noting that these championships get extensive TV coverage in the whole region. “The people here are so happy that I came. Everyone has been just wonderful to me. I haven’t been nervous at all. "
The same can’t be said for her hosts who, while hailing her participation (“brave,” said the head of the Turkish weightlifting federation), have also provided Berube with special security throughout her stay. Berube has been assigned two bodyguards who shadow her whenever she leaves her hotel room. They don’t speak any English, and each day the three of them go down to the hotel’s front desk to find someone to translate her training schedule for her constant companions. Berube calls the two men “my friends,” but the communication between them is so sketchy that she admits she’s not exactly sure who they are “except that they have guns and badges and everything.”
Today, with her security team in tow, Berube finally went to the arena to compete–for herself and for her country. She finished fourth in the snatch with a lift of 192.5 pounds and eighth in the clean and jerk with a lift of 236.5 pounds; her combined totals placed her fifth overall in her weight class. Though Berube fell short of her medal dreams, it was a truly great victory for the American weightlifting team.
