Army Spouse Strikes First Gold in Sydney Games

 

 By Tim Hipps
 
Special to the American Forces Press Service
 
 SYDNEY, Australia, Sept. 18, 2000 -- A United States Army spouse was 
 the first athlete to strike gold Down Under in the 2000 Summer Olympic 
 Games.
 
 Nancy Johnson, wife of Staff Sgt. Kenneth Johnson, scored 9.9 points to 
 break a first-place deadlock on her 10th and final shot in the women's 
 10-meter air rifle finale Sept. 16. She defeated Korea's Cho-Hyun Kang, 
 497.7 to 497.5, in a climactic frenzy for the first gold medal of the 
 28th Olympiad at Cecil Park Shooting Centre.
 
 "I did it! I did it!" Johnson exclaimed moments after realizing her 
 historic feat. "I won the first gold medal at the Olympics!" Make that 
 the first gold medal of the Millennium Games -- and the first of any 
 kind in the event since Pat Spurgin's gold in Los Angeles in 1984.
 
 "The fact that it's the first one is awesome," said Johnson, 26, of 
 Hinsdale, Ill. "That's pretty cool. They can't take this one away. I 
 did my job." She considered the victory a redemption for finishing a 
 disappointing 36th in the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta.
 
 "To be able to hold on and constantly move up is a good feeling," she 
 said. "There was a pack of us in there with the same score, so it was 
 anybody's game. I usually keep track of where I am. But because the 
 scoreboard was above my head, every time I looked up I was looking into 
 the lights, so I didn't want to do that. So I stopped looking."
 
 "I had to finish strong," she said. "Had to finish strong." On the 
 final shot, Johnson fired a 9.9 to runner-up Kang's 9.7.
 
 The women's competition consists of 40 shots fired from the standing 
 position within 75 minutes, with the top eight shooters entering a 10-
 round final with 75 seconds per shot. In the finals, the 10 ring is 
 one-half millimeter wide -- less than 1/50 of an inch.
 
 "My dad got me into shooting at age 15," she explained. "I wanted to 
 try archery originally, but there wasn't anything around that was 
 available to me. But there was a local rifle club."
 
 From there, she climbed the ranks of the air-rifle elite, knowing all 
 along that it was the first event on the 2000 Olympic Games calendar.
 
 "You know as an air-rifle shooter that your event is always going to be 
 first, no matter what Olympics it's at," she explained. "I knew a year 
 ago that my event would be first and that I had a whack at winning 
 gold. I was just thinking: 'How cool would it be to win the first gold 
 medal of the Olympics?' In my qualifying round, I was a little nervous 
 and a little tense."
 
 And then she carried on like a champion.
 
 "I just got over it and went out there with a smile on my face," 
 Johnson said of the final round. "And went out there to do my best." On 
 this day, her best was best in the world.
 
 "I just wanted to get through it," Johnson said. "I knew that if I 
 could keep it together with a lot of 10's and not with the 9's. I had 
 no idea that it was so close. I really wasn't paying attention to 
 anybody else and what they were doing.
 
 "I looked up at one point and saw that I was in medal contention, but I 
 told myself I wasn't going to look anymore because it was unnerving me 
 a little bit. I had no idea the final shot was what won it. I'm pleased 
 that I didn't know."
 
 Her husband, Ken, who's competing in Sydney in the same air-rifle event 
 for men, is a member of the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit at Fort 
 Benning, Ga. He said the unit has adopted Nancy.
 
 "She's been training at Fort Benning for the last three years now," 
 said Johnson, who married Nancy in 1998. "She trains with the Army and 
 works with the Army coach. She's part of our team in a loose sort of 
 way, so it's just an outstanding feeling.
 
 "[U.S. Army Recruiting Command] is very interested in her because she's 
 my wife and they want to show that husbands and wives can do things in 
 the Army together, so that's really cool. It's just a great feeling. 
 She's been training for 15 years, and I've been training for about 17 
 years. So this is a logical culmination of it all.
 
 "She was in the '96 Olympics, but she came in 38th. So she really had a 
 personal vendetta to come back here and kick some butt, and she did. I 
 wrote all my letters home already saying the probability of one of us 
 coming home with a medal is very high, so here it is. Both of us have 
 been shooting scores capable of winning regularly.
 
 "I knew she could do it," he said.
 
 Nancy's confidence soared knowing she had the Army in her corner.
 
 "They've played a huge role," she said. "Col. (Arch) Arnold has given 
 me permission to train at Fort Benning, which I started doing about 3 
 1/2 years ago. That's been really instrumental because there aren't 
 many places in our country to train, and Fort Benning has one of the 
 best facilities in the country. Even the Army coach has really adopted 
 me. Bill Krilling has been instrumental in a lot of my success." 
 
 Arnold is the marksmanship unit commander. Krilling is the unit 
 international rifle team coach.
 
 Between rounds Saturday, Nancy turned to husband Ken for advice.
 
 "I didn't say anything magical, but at the same time, I think I knew 
 what to say. But, hey, she was the one who pulled the trigger," the 
 sergeant said. "It's hard to draw a parallel between the Army team and 
 a husband-and-wife team because a husband-and-wife team is so much more 
 to me. But our Army team is very close-knit. If one of us wins a medal, 
 it's just as good as the next guy winning a medal. That's awesome. And 
 this can get very contagious. She's just beside herself right now.
 
 "It could've been the last gold medal and it could've been one in the 
 middle. But being that it's the first, and for the United States, and 
 my wife -- you can't beat that."
 
 (Tim Hipps is the Army Community and Family Support Center Olympics 
 correspondent in Sydney, Australia.)
 
 

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