FAIRMONT – In summer 1976, Mary Lou Retton was 8 years old – and glued to the console television set in the living room of her childhood home on Beverly Road, on the west side of this Marion County city.
She couldn’t get enough of that year’s Summer Olympic Games in Montreal.
Specifically, the prowess of Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian gymnast who was the first in her sport to score a perfect 10 in Olympic history.
“I want to do that,” she said to her parents, Lois and Ronnie.
Eight years later, at the age of 16 in the Summer Games in Los Angeles – she did.
She ended up on the Wheaties box and her hometown renamed Beverly Road to Mary Lou Retton Drive, in her honor.
Now, America is once again tumbling for the gymnast from West Virginia who captured hearts and gold in California 39 years ago.
As of late Wednesday afternoon, more than $285,000 had poured into a crowdfunding campaign set up by her daughter, McKenna Kelley, to help defray medical costs for Retton, who is critically ill and on a ventilator in a Texas hospital, she said.
Her mother, now 55, is fighting “a rare form of pneumonia,” Kelley wrote on Spotfund.com.
She’s waging that fight without medical insurance, her daughter said in her Tuesday post that launched the effort.
“We ask that if you can help in any way, that 1) you PRAY! and 2) if you could help us finances for the hospital bill,” that post read.
“ANYTHING, absolutely anything, would be so helpful for my family and my mom. Thank y’all so very much!”
As said, it didn’t take long – and donors posted their own sentiments, along with their dollars.
“You are a fantastic person and a role model for so many women,” wrote one.
“Healing thoughts for our national treasure,” said another.
And another: “I remember your Olympics like yesterday, and how thrilling it was to watch you.”
Coming up in her gymnast career, Retton wasn’t necessarily thinking about icon status, she told The Dominion Post in 2014.
She just wanted to compete. Her brothers were all sports stars at Fairmont Senior High School.
Her sister was a WVU gymnastics star, in her own right.
And her dad, Ronnie, was a basketball standout for the state’s flagship university, as a starter on the Jerry West-led Mountaineer basketball team that almost took it all in the 1959 NCAA tournament, losing by one point to California in the final.
After the medals
In the mid-2000s, she and her then-husband Shannon Kelley, moved from Texas – where she had lived since her teens after going full-on with her Olympic pursuits – to her hometown, after Kelley accepted a football coaching position at Fairmont State University.
Retton by then had parlayed her Olympic experience into a career as a nationally touring motivational speaker.
She also became the celebrity face of Mon Health Medical Center for a time, as that facility was where her father had successfully undergone open-heart surgery some years before.
Another coaching job took the couple back to Texas. They have since divorced.
In 2018, Retton competed on ABC’s popular “Dancing with the Stars” show.
Medical procedures, meanwhile, are nothing new to the elite athlete, as she told this newspaper nine years ago.
By then, she had logged 15 orthopedic surgeries, she said, including two hip replacements.
Arthritis was also a byproduct of her Olympic journey, Retton said.
“I’m pretty beat-up,” she said.
“It is what it is. I pushed my body beyond normal limits. That’s what I get for sticking my landings.”
