She's interrupted her college education to stew (sometimes in all senses of the term) for United. After working on commission for New England Life, he went on a pre-Olympics leave of absence last February. Since then, they have survived on her $900 a month salary and her airline employee discount rates which enabled them to fly together to sharpening pre-Montreal competitions. Chrystie, meanwhile, also took over the rest of his hassling distractions like booking his hotel reservations and managing the family finances.
Chrystie's acceptance of her vicarious life (not to mention frequent phone calls from track-and-field groupies) came only after an inner battle that converted her to feminism. "I was prepared to support Bruce but never realized the emotional effort that would go along with it," she recalls. "I was sacrificing more of my needs than was necessary. Bruce was very attentive and sensitive, but I was still resentful."
Chrystie turned to a therapist "who taught me it was my choice to sacrifice and how to take things for myself and not feel selfish." One thing she took was membership in the National Organization for Women. Feminists at the local chapter, she found, "gave me the courage to be me—which is assertive and even aggressive at times." How'd Bruce take her liberation? "He had more faith in me and my abilities than I did," Chrystie admits. "He went to a NOW meeting and got excited for me." "Working as a stewardess was not much of a challenge for her," Bruce elaborates. "All those exciting things were happening to me while she was in the background. She's more competitive now, and on the whole, I like it."
When Bruce hit a depressing slump last year, it was Chrystie's turn to shore him up with a marathon Knute Rockne rap. "She gave me a hard time until 3 a.m., about giving 100 percent," Bruce recalls. "She said, 'I'll take care of the finances, you just run!' One month later, I had the world record."
Jenner figures that "competition is 80 percent mental and just 20 percent physical." Of course, that's easy to say for someone who packs 195 pounds of muscle on a 6'2" frame and looks like the model for Michelangelo's David. Every morning Bruce runs for an hour (Chrystie used to join him until an old back injury acted up). After lunch, where he gulps down one of four daily Baggies stuffed with vitamin pills, Bruce trots back out to the track for another rigorous workout. "By June he'll be down to two or three hours a day," says coach Chrystie. "Overtraining is a big problem." Psychologically, too. At night, Chrystie notes, "he runs in his sleep. I'll see his legs moving, or he'll give a big grunt and move his shoulder as if he's putting the shot." (The night before a big competition, he says, he often doesn't sleep at all.)
Chrystie's job often requires her to be on 24-hour call, and she reports that "Bruce keeps this place so clean when I'm away I sometimes feel guilty. Except for hanging up his clothes; it's like living in a gymnasium." She's referring to the training area he's made out of one of the two bedrooms of their tiny flat, which is constantly littered with sweat socks, warm-up suits and the eight pairs of shoes he wears for his 10 events. A javelin and five vaulting poles rattle around in their carport (threatening their one indulgence, a Porsche they're still paying for).
The first time Chrystie saw Bruce she figured him for "an immature, yuk-it-up guy." Of course, they were only frosh then at Iowa's Graceland College, run by the Reorganized Church of the Latter Day Saints. Bruce, son of a Newtown, Conn., tree surgeon, had been a three-sports star and boys' eastern waterskiing champ. He came to Graceland for football and hurt his knee the first fall. That led him to track and eventually to the decathlon. Chrystie, the daughter of a minister and GE foreman from San Jose, was a schoolgirl track star herself. ("I still have my little medals upstairs," she confides. "Bruce just laughs at me.")
Bruce's main first impression of Chrystie was only that "she was one of the better-looking women on campus"—when she was around. She dropped out three semesters for an engagement that fell through. By Bruce's senior year, Chrystie was back and sharing an apartment with her roommates and Bruce. ("Let's just say I spent a lot of evenings there," he protests, blushing.) They were married four months after Bruce's unexpectedly high 10th-place finish at the Munich Olympics.
Chrystie and both of their families—she and Bruce are extraordinarily close to their in-laws—have scoffed up a block of 40 tickets to watch Bruce at Montreal. She's missed only two of his decathlons and has traveled as far as New Zealand to be with him. Now, though, she fumes that United may not furlough her for the Olympics. "If they don't," she warns, "I'll quit. That medal means as much to me as it does to Bruce."
After the Olympics, Bruce will quit for good and compete from behind a desk. Then Chrystie figures it'll be her turn on the inside lane. After collecting the 50 credits she needs for a B.A. (she dropped out before graduation to go into stew training), it's on to law school. Bruce isn't complaining. "She has sacrificed all this for me," he admits. "I hope that I'll be able to do the same for her."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
