It’s Just the Schedule That’s Rigged : Sailing Gold Medalist Allison Jolly Doesn’t Get a Break

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — It hasn’t been long since Allison Jolly flew home from Seoul, medal in hand, skipper of the only U.S. sailboat to win gold at the 1988 Olympics.

So what’s she doing 3,000 miles from her California home, racing a little boat in the middle of the chilly, wind-whipped Chesapeake Bay in the unlikely hope of winning one more trophy?

“To tell the truth, I’m not sure,” the 32-year-old computer programmer from Long Beach laughed wearily. “This was my husband’s idea. I’m still jet-lagged.”

It turns out dinghy racer Mark Elliot signed himself and Jolly up for the U.S. Yacht Racing Union’s 3-day Championship of Champions here just to make sure his wife had something to look forward to, in case she didn’t do well at the first Olympics ever to offer a women’s sailing event.

At least that’s what Jolly thinks his reasoning was, and it pretty well sums up the low-key attitude she took to her thoroughly successful South Korean odyssey. All she hoped for was a medal, she said. That she and her partner blew the competition out of the water with two wins, two seconds and a third in the first six races was a happy surprise.

The highly touted U.S. sailing team put on quite a show in Pusan Bay, as it happened, walking off with five medals in the eight Olympic classes. But only Jolly and partner Lynne Jewell, of whom little was expected 5 months ago, struck gold in their 470-class dinghy.

Some surprise. As recently as last May, Jolly and Jewell were not considered serious contenders for the Games.

That made Elliot mad, but he concedes now that the women had followed a course so radically different from their key Olympic rivals, including highly touted skippers J.J. Isler and Susan Taylor, that no one knew Jolly and Jewell were lurking until they pounced.

While Isler, Taylor and other U.S. women’s contenders were off in South America, Israel and Europe racing against the best in the world for months on end, Jolly and Jewell stayed home from January to June, sailing in local regattas and working out with weights on the theory that time spent in the boat and building strength was more valuable than wandering the globe hunting competition.

“We figured if you race for a week in Europe, that’s only seven races,” said Jolly. “Then you have all that time waiting for your boat, waiting for planes. At practice, we were doing hundreds of tacks a day, a hundred mark-roundings. We made out by not going to Europe.”

But the trap wasn’t sprung until June, when Jolly and Jewell finally faced top U.S. skippers at Canada’s Olympic trials. “We won easily,” said Jolly, “and we still had a hot, new boat coming for the U.S. trials” the next month.

“At that point,” said Elliot, “everybody else looked worried.”

With reason. In the first six of eight U.S. trial races off Newport, R.I., Jolly and Jewell finished 2-1-1-1-2-1, a blowout.

The competition at the U.S. trials turned out to be stiffer than at the Olympics. Jolly said six or eight of the best women’s teams in the world are from the United States, and they already had been dispatched at Newport.

Still, she went to Korea with modest expectations. Jewell is the optimist in the boat, said Jolly. “I’m the realist.”

And in howling winds off Pusan, anything could and did happen, including a disqualification after they capsized in 25-knot winds in the fifth race, which cost them a third-place finish.

Even with the disqualification, Jolly and Jewell were far enough ahead by the last race that they only had to finish in the top 14 to take gold. They made it, sailing conservatively to a ninth-place finish in winds so severe they didn’t know until they were on shore where they’d wound up. “We could have been 10th or 20th,” Jolly said. “We didn’t know.”

Which brings us to Annapolis, where Elliot and his travel-weary wife face some of the top U.S. sailors, male and female, this past week in the annual U.S. Yacht Racing Union invitational for teams that won small-boat national championships.

Skipper Jolly and Elliot, her crew, are reigning Coronado 15 champions, but in this regatta, like the other 19 competitors, they must sail 17-foot Snipes from the Severn Sailing Association’s fleet of day racers.

A Snipe is a lovely boat, but very different from a 470-larger, slower and less nimble--and for all her training and Olympic fitness, Jolly is having a hard time adapting. “This regatta,” she said, “will be a lot harder to win than the Olympics.”

When they came in last Monday after the first day of racing, she and Elliot lay ninth in the fleet and marital harmony was not at its height. “It’s hard for couples to sail together,” said Jolly with a sigh.

Later, she expounded. “I’m sailing with a rock around my neck,” she said, laughing and pointing sheepishly at her husband, who spent months nurturing her boat and her ego en route to the grandest prize a small-boat sailor can aspire to, Olympic gold.

“It’s the first time I’ve had a chance to sail in a year,” Elliot said by way of explanation.

Gold medal to rock around your neck is a long fall, of course. But Jolly looked as if she could handle it. No problem.