OC Register article on Peter Vidmar

Peter Vidmar and the guys celebrate the U.S. team's golden performance at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

A great feature that gives big insight about the motivations of 1984 Olympic team captain Peter Vidmar, the Paul Hamm of American gymnastics before Paul Hamm.

He remembers the broken glasses and the bloodied face, but even more so he remembers the chuckle afterward.

Peter Vidmar, maybe 10 at the time, looked up at his 5-foot-4 father thinking the old man had been mugged.

John Vidmar instead had fallen in the street, landing face-first, betrayed by a left leg emaciated by polio and arms slowed by the disease.

In concluding the account, Peter’s dad told him, “Guess I gotta be more careful next time, huh?” Then he smiled. And chuckled.

“How can I complain and moan about things,” Peter recalls thinking that day, “and come home to a man like that?”

Vidmar was perhaps the best pommel horse worker in U.S. history (that takes consistency into account too, Sasha Artemev fans.) Turns out, the now-motivational speaker still uses it to further his success.

He has done more than 1,000 of these presentations and once did 160 in a year. Only twice has he not used a pommel horse.

Here’s part of one of them:

Parts two and three of Vidmar’s presentation are available on Youtube.