Reliving 1976 decathlon win with Caitlyn Jenner
— -- For Caitlyn Jenner, there are places to be and people to speak with.
There are camera crews and magazine covers, finely crafted documentaries and the raw urgency of reality TV. There are ex-spouses with stories to share and 10 children, many of them living their own lives, out loud and then some. There are more transgender women getting to tell their stories about their life journeys.
And yet, almost a year-and-a-half since going public with her gender transition, Jenner says her life is much less complicated than it has ever been.
"I don't have any more lies," she told ESPN. "It's tough to go through life when you're lying to yourself, lying to your family all the time, lying to the public about who you are. Every time I would confide in somebody over the last 50 years, it was always such a weight off my shoulder, like, 'Whew. I don't have to lie to that person about who I am anymore. They understand.'
"Today, I just can get up, be myself and have a smile on my face. I finally found happiness in my life."
Forty years after Jenner won the decathlon gold medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, we sat down with her to relive that event. We asked, how should we refer to the person who won over America -- and the world -- back then?
"As Bruce," she says. "Over the last year-and-a-half, I've met some of the most wonderful, smart, intelligent trans people out there. They all kinda say the same thing: When you go through something like this, everybody from the outside looking in thinks, 'Oh my God, you're just a totally different person now.' No, not really."
Jenner, now 66, has no issue accessing thoughts and feelings from that time, and no shortage of stories about everything that made that medal possible.
"I had a better athletic mind [than the competition]," she says. "Every time I would get under a tremendous amount of pressure, I could take that pressure and turn it into performance. My greatest accomplishment at the Games, which made me the most happy when it was over with, [was that] I went in and scored 8,634 points. Nobody had ever done that before."
As we watch the event again, Jenner starts weighing in. There was the moment when Jenner had cleared the opening height in the pole vault, before an audience of ... none?
"The stadium was totally empty," she recalls. "They had a morning session and then an afternoon session, and it was separate tickets. So you went to the morning session, and then everybody had to leave. When I cleared it on my opening height, there was nobody around. It was just little old me and my pole-vaulting pole."
Even Jenner's mother and father weren't there. "When my parents came back in, they kept watching the bar go up," she says. "They didn't know I had cleared my opening height, so they're all worried to death that [I was going to] come in at too high a height and not make it."
The 1,500 meters would be a glorious conclusion, but the issue had already been settled. Jenner would win the gold.
"Now here's the problem I have," Jenner says now, with a smile. "Decathlon -- 10 events, OK? You've got to go through two days of competition for one lousy medal. Michael Phelps gets a medal in every event, in every Olympics -- every event! Yeah, I only got one medal. All that work, one medal, but it's a good medal."
At 11 p.m. that night in Montreal, sitting down with ABC's Jim Lampley, Jenner would start to get the full sense of the opportunities that awaited. Whatever the appeal to Madison Avenue and corporate America, Jenner didn't seem like the embodiment of youthful irony or mid-'70s cool to anyone. On "Saturday Night Live," the home office of cultural hipness back then, John Belushi would mock straight-arrow Jenner's celebration and subsequent endorsement deals with a Marv Albert-narrated parody ad.
There was a lot we didn't know.
"Back when I was young, in the '50s and the '60s, they didn't even have a name for gender dysphoria," Jenner says. "I was a dyslexic kid, suffering from low self-esteem, I had gender issues ... all these issues going on inside that I didn't want anybody to know. ... But it always came back to identity. After the Games were over with, I actually got a little scared, thinking, 'Oh my god, I lost my beard. What do I do now?'"
There was television work, those endorsements, children to raise. And there were secrets to keep.
"For the Games, I woke up every day excited about the day," Jenner recalls. "Then, once the Games were over with, to be honest with you, for many, many, many, many, many years, I lost that in life. I could care less about the next day. There were so many days that I didn't care if I got out of bed. At one time in the '80s, I spent almost six years in my house, never really came out. I didn't fit in with the males, I didn't fit in with the females. I was kind of stuck in the middle of limbo. It was really quite depressing."
What the Games once did for Jenner, making the decision to live life publicly as a transgender woman has done once more.
"Because of what's happened over the last year-and-a-half, I really feel like I got my mojo back," she says. "I have a platform where I think I can make a difference. A lot of issues in the LGBT world, around the world -- we have tremendous issues in the trans community with acceptance, with understanding. We have a nine-times higher suicide rate for young kids. There's a lot of hatred [and] bigotry out there."
Two days might have earned Jenner a platform; four decades later, she believes she finally knows how to use it.
"What I'm doing today is so much more important than the Games," she says.
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