Vidmar still mining Olympic vein 20 years after golden moment

ATHENS — For the first week of the Athens Olympics, he has been a fixture at the Olympic Indoor Hall where the gymnastics competition is taking place. When he isn't doing color commentary for Westwood One, NBC's radio arm for these Games, he's talking with Katie Couric on the "Today Show" set, or he's entertaining executives of the John Hancock Co., or he's giving interviews, posing for pictures and signing autographs.

Twenty years after he struck Olympic gold, Peter Vidmar is still mining it.

It's been five Olympiads now since Vidmar won two gold medals and a silver in his hometown of Los Angeles in 1984. He was a member of the winning U.S. men's gymnastics team and added a second gold medal in pommel horse when he scored a perfect 10. He almost got a third gold medal in the all-around, but lost by 25/1000ths of a point to Koji Gushiken of Japan.

Vidmar recalls that the 1984 all-around competition was so close that when he completed his final routine, he calculated the math quickly in his head and thought he'd won. When Katie Couric asked him how American Paul Hamm might feel if he won the Olympic all-around championship, Pete said, "I can tell you exactly how he'd feel. For about 10 seconds in 1984, until I realized my math was wrong, I had that feeling — and it was great."

Vidmar would have been the first U.S. male to win the men's Olympic all-around — a feat Hamm finally accomplished Wednesday night with Pete doing color commentary on the radio — which made settling for silver even more of a disappointment. But it's hard to imagine it making much of a difference in what has happened to his life ever since.

As a double Olympic gold medalist, Vidmar has spent the past 20 years conducting a clinic on how to turn gold into cash flow. He has taken his experience and turned it into his living.

Even by Olympic standards and even 20 years later, Vidmar's is a compelling story; a kind of combination "Karate Kid" and "Chariots of Fire." Too small for football and basketball, he turned his size, or lack thereof, into an advantage in a sport where 5-foot-6 is not a liability. When he was 12, he answered an ad in the local newspaper that said former Olympic gymnast Mako Sakamoto wanted to train future Olympic champions.

For 10 years, Vidmar did exactly what "Coach Mako" said he should do, with the notable exception of training on Sunday. Six days a week, he became intimate with the inside of gymnasiums, not emerging until the 1984 Games unfolded, fortuitously, in his own back yard.

After the Games, Peter packed those 11 years into a one-hour motivational speech that he discovered corporations loved. They also loved it when he brought along the pommel horse and demonstrated his perfect 10 on stage.