Dianne Durham, 1st Black gymnast to win U.S. title

Dianne Durham, a standout gymnast who in 1983 became the first African American to win the U.S. national championship, an achievement that won her enduring acclaim as a pathbreaker in her sport even as Olympic glory eluded her, died Feb. 4 at a hospital in Chicago. She was 52.

Her husband, Tom Drahozal, confirmed her death but declined to disclose the cause.

Growing up in the steel town of Gary, Ind., Durham discovered the thrill of gymnastics in early childhood, when her parents enrolled her and her sister in lessons hoping to help the girls burn off excess energy.

Durham quickly revealed herself as a prodigious talent and, shortly after her 13th birthday, became one of the few major Black gymnasts in the world when she moved to Texas to train under coach Bela Karolyi.

Karolyi had recently defected from Romania, where he had turned the national team into a powerhouse and discovered Nadia Comaneci, the 14-year-old star of the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal, where she became the first Olympic gymnast to receive a perfect 10.

Durham’s victory at the 1983 U.S. national championships — along with her gold medals in the vault, balance beam and floor exercise events — brought her national attention, although Durham said she was more focused on the next year’s Olympics than on her immediate achievement.

“People said, you’re the first Black — I’m using ‘Black’ because ‘African American’ wasn’t a term in my era — national champion,” she told ESPN in an interview last year. “Do you know that didn’t go through my head one time?” she said. “Not one time. Do you know how many people had to tell me that? I could not understand why that was such a humongous deal.”

The national championship made Durham one of Karolyi’s first American stars. Another was Mary Lou Retton, who trained with Durham for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

“Dianne was one of the greatest athletes and the best gymnast of our generation,” Retton recalled to the Chicago Tribune in 2004. “She had it all: personality, strength, grace. When we trained together, seven or eight hours a day, we really became like sisters. She was always my best and fiercest competitor.”

Expectations surrounding both athletes mounted in the run-up to the 1984 Games. But Durham suffered a string of injuries, culminating with a torn ankle ligament when she landed a challenging vault at the Olympic trials.

She withdrew from the trials and, through what the Olympic Committee Association described years later as a combination of “injuries and a Byzantine selection process,” was not offered a spot on the 1984 team. Karolyi protested, declaring at the time that it was “a pretty big injustice to not have Dianne on the Olympic team” and that “the team needs her, the country needs her.”

“I was depressed,” Durham told ESPN. “The city of Gary was behind me 100,000%, and I felt like I let my family down. Everybody uprooted their lives for me. It does take a chunk out of you, when you have literally played by the rules and done the right things and trained hard and did everything that you were supposed to do correctly, to have it end up that way.”

Retton went on to claim five medals at the Olympics that year, including the individual all-around gold, and became an icon of the sport. Durham soon retired from competition.

She was credited as a groundbreaker for gymnasts including Betty Okino and Dominique Dawes, who became the first Black gymnasts to win an Olympic medal when they took bronze in the team event at Barcelona in 1992. Four years later in Atlanta, Dawes won a bronze in floor exercise — making her the first Black female gymnast to win an individual Olympic medal — as well as gold in the team event.

In London in 2012, Gabby Douglas became the first Black woman to win the Olympic allaround title. Simone Biles, an African American Olympian who won four gold medals and one bronze at Rio de Janeiro in 2016, is widely considered one of the best gymnasts in history.

Dianne Patrice Durham was born in Gary on June 17, 1968. Her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father was director of industrial relations at a steel mill. Gymnastics lessons, she told the Tribune, were “a way for us to stop wrecking the house.”

“We were tearing up the furniture,” she recalled of herself and her sister. “We were wild. We started doing gymnastics, and it was so much fun.”

As Durham became increasingly serious about the sport, her parents began driving her daily to a more competitive training facility 60 miles away, with Dianne eating meals and completing homework during the commute.

The training regimen became so grueling that she quit at one point, telling her parents that she did not wish to disappoint them but that she was burned out. But she soon resumed training, ultimately joining Karolyi’s club in 1982.

She said she began to understand the import of her accomplishments as a Black athlete only when she traveled to a competition in South Africa when she was 13.

“I was a kid,” she told the Tribune. “What did I know about apartheid? It was the most beautiful place. I stayed with a family, wonderful people, and a house with tennis courts and horses. One day I was speaking with the maid and she said how much she wanted to go to America and I asked why she would ever want to leave such a beautiful country. Then I started to realize what was going on, to see the ugliness and painful side of that country.”

“At the meet there was a white section and a black section,” she continued, “and when I won, all the blacks stood up and were cheering. I can’t tell you the feeling of pride that gave me.”

After her competitive athletic career, Durham coached under Karolyi and at the University of Illinois at Chicago, performed in gymnastic shows and worked as a professional dancer. Besides her husband of 26 years, of Chicago, survivors include her father, Ural Durham of Merrillville, Ind., and her sister.

“I don’t feel sorry for myself,” Durham told the Tribune, reflecting on her missed Olympic opportunity. “Nobody is going to give you anything in this life. You have to work for anything and everything you get. And sometimes it doesn’t go the way you want it to go. You fall, but you have to get back up ... I am happy.”

The suspicious posts began appearing on Craigslist, a few hours after health officials in Massachusetts announced a key expansion of who could receive the coronavirus vaccine. “Companions” to those older than 75 were now eligible, the state said, but only if these caregivers helped accompany seniors to vaccination sites.

Suddenly, it seemed on the classifieds website, plenty of younger residents wanted to start spending time with septuagenarians. Especially if money was involved.

“Some people [are] posting online, trying to get a senior to bring them to a vaccination site, or in some cases asking to be paid to drive somebody to one,” Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said at a news conference Thursday, calling the ads “pretty disturbing.”

The ensuing fracas over the”companion system” has since been criticized by some state lawmakers, who say it all but guaranteed to encourage dangerous scams and fail to ensure Massachusetts's most vulnerable populations will receive the vaccine first.

“We shouldn't be having people haggle for vaccine appointments on Craigslist, Facebook, and other social media sites,” state Rep. Tami Gouveia, a public health social worker, wrote on Twitter. “This isn't safe, equitable, or effective.”

As larger and increasingly diverse pockets of the U.S. population suddenly find themselves able to sign up for a vaccine shot, the episode may preview the difficulties associated with prioritizing broader, more nebulously defined groups.

When the shot first arrived in many parts of the country, hospitals and nursing homes took on the responsibility of distributing it to their essential employees. Seniors who began to qualify in ensuing weeks could prove they were eligible simply by showing the age on their IDs.

But granting strict priority to essential workers like day laborers or farmhands, whose job arrangements are often more informal, as well as groups defined by a personal practice such as smoking, may prove easier said than done. There is no clear answer on how — or whether — officials might corroborate that an individual is in those groups and meets the threshold for a vaccine.

In Massachusetts, the “companion system” was conceived as an attempt to solve an existing problem in the state's vaccine rollout. Like in many other parts of the country, technologically-challenged seniors had struggled to navigate a complex website of appointments and frustrating scenes at vaccination sites.

On Wednesday, state officials said that caretakers could start signing up for “companion appointments” on the same day as the seniors they were transporting to a vaccination site. It was the state's first exception made for residents who fall out of Phases 1 and 2 of the state's immunization plan.

But by the time of his early afternoon news conference the following day, both Baker and several Democratic lawmakers had taken note of potential schemes on Craigslist.

One person in Boston reportedly wrote they “Will PAY $200 to assist 75+ year old with COVID vaccine process,” according to a screenshot by state Rep. Mike Connolly.

A Cambridge resident said they were “Paying $100 to book with eligible senior for vaccine.” And in Brookline, one ad made an offer for “Free Pickup and Dropoff for COVID Vaccine.” (All three ads appear to have been taken down as of early Friday, although similar offers remain online.)

Many Democratic state lawmakers seized on the posts to criticize Baker for this and other aspects of Massachusetts's immunization campaign, saying it failed to address the obstacles that had been preventing senior citizens from easily getting shots.

“The companion system will put thousands of healthy adults ahead of those who have the most significant risk of getting and dying from COVID-19,” a group of a dozen Democratic lawmakers, including Gouveia, wrote in a letter to Baker.

The group said the strategy could prove “dangerous” for seniors, “opening up opportunities for individuals with mal-intent” to prey upon older residents who lack reliable transportation or are in need of additional sources of income.

They suggested that Massachusetts should instead adopt a wait-list policy, by which young, healthy adults can sign up for last-minute appointments in the case of cancellations or additional vaccines.

But while the policy is in place,Baker offered a warning to elderly residents at his news conference. He urged them not to share their personal information with strangers and to report any potential scammers to the police.

“You should only reach out to somebody you know or trust to bring as your companion,” he said.