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A Life-Changing Moment
Robert Lee's dream of Olympic gold imploded on a gymnastics mat in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It happened in a split second on July 4, 1983, two days before his 18th birthday. The Los Angeles Games were still a year off, but Lee was working to master a risky move. He had done it hundreds of times -- 360-degree somersault, midair twist, two-hand landing and roll. But on this evening, as his fellow gymnasts watched in horror, he failed to gain enough height and crashed to the ground on his chin."It felt as if someone had dumped a ton of sand on me and just my head was sticking out," Lee remembers. "I didn't know where my body was." The impact crushed his spinal cord at the seventh vertebra, causing paralysis of both his legs and arms. In an instant, he went from being an elite athlete to a quadriplegic.
A decade earlier, Robert Seung-bok Lee had emigrated from South Korea with his mother, father, brother and sister. "My parents wanted us to have a bigger and better life in America," he says, "but it was tough." Leaving a spacious house behind in Seoul, the family squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment in Flushing, New York. Lee's pharmacist father, unable to get licensed in the United States, found work mopping floors at Jamaica Hospital, an hour's ride away by carpool. His mother, who had always stayed home to care for her children, took a job at the nearby Swingline stapler factory.
Lee knew no English; he thought if he spoke slowly and loudly in his native language, the other kids at school would understand him. When he unpacked the lunch his mother had made him -- rice, tiny dried fish and spicy fried vegetables -- his classmates screamed, "What is he eating?"
Frantic to fit in, Lee hurried home each day and copied words he didn't understand from the dictionary. He bought a skateboard and clothing with American labels, but he still felt like an outsider. "I had this emptiness inside me," he remembers, "and I didn't know how to fill it."
One summer day in 1976 while watching the Montreal Olympic Games on his family's small TV set, Lee found the answer. When Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci scored seven perfect 10s, Lee thought, That's me. "I wanted to wear all those gold medals and show the kids who belittled me that I was a proud South Korean."
He began sneaking through the back door at the Flushing YMCA to attend open gymnastics workouts. "I had a passion for it from the beginning," he says. When he'd saved enough to enroll in classes, he began training on the pommel horse, rings and parallel bars. After, he would practice floor exercises on the grass in the botanical garden across from his apartment.
At age 15, Lee earned a spot at an Olympic training center in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His parents begged him not to go. He was their eldest son, they said, and it was his duty to focus on academics and go to college. "You're just going through some teenage phase," his father snapped. But Lee couldn't be stopped.
In the early '80s, he won two gold medals at the junior-level U.S. Nationals. On the day of his catastrophic injury, Lee, who had maintained his South Korean citizenship, qualified for his native country's national team and was on track to be named to its 1984 Olympic squad.
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