By Bob Hertzel for the Times West Virginian
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — It was August 3 in the Orwellian year of 1984, a time not unlike today, 40 years later, with the world as badly divided and seeking a hero.
It was an Olympic year, as it is now. Four years earlier, in 1980, the United States had boycotted the Moscow Olympics, so now Moscow and the Eastern Bloc countries were boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.
That was an Olympic year that West Virginia would never forget, a year when a 4-foot-9-inch heroine captured the same spirit that had come to the United States four years earlier in the Miracle on Ice in the 1980 winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Her name was Mary Lou Retton and if you lived in Fairmont, she well might have been your neighbor, your friend.
But she would not be the only person with West Virginia connections to win gold in 1984 as the West Virginia rifle coach, Ed Etzel, himself a former NCAA champion while a student at WVU, also would capture the gold in the 50-meter free prone rifle event.
Imagine, if you can, that in the same Olympic games two athletes from within 15 miles of each other in the land they call “Almost Heaven” had their prayers answered in Olympic Gold … Retton with a perfect 10 and Etzel with a nearly perfect score of 599, his one point deduction being so close a shot that in today’s electronic scoring he might have been given credit for his own perfect score.