Growing Up Nancy Thies – University of Illinois Athletics

By Mike Pearson

FightingIllini.com

Young teenage girls have a myriad of challenges with which to deal, including appearance and self-esteem, developing friendships and surviving bullies, peer pressure, and the physiological evolution of their bodies.

And while young Nancy Thies (Marshall) dealt with all of that, the multi-talented Urbanian who grew up at 2115 Boudreau Drive also was training to become a world class athlete in gymnastics.

At the tender age of 15, she became an Olympian, performing at the 1972 Games in Munich, Germany against gold medal winners Olga Korbut and Ludmila Tourischeva. The future Illini gymnast and Big Ten champion is credited with being the first person to perform back aerial tumbling on the balance beam in Olympic competition.

During her multi-faceted career, Nancy has worked for NBC-TV as an analyst, authored athletic-themed books, volunteered and led nonprofit organizations, and served on numerous advisory boards. She retired in 2020 as the Director of Human Resources at Corban University in Salem, Ore. Nancy married Charlie Marshall in 1981 and they have three children and four granddaughters.

In 2010, she was inducted into the World Acrobatic Society Hall of Fame, and in 2017 became a charter class member of the University of Illinois Athletics Hall of Fame.

In a recent interview, Marshall discussed the beginnings of her athletic career, capped by her performance as an Olympian.

You grew up in Urbana on Boudreau Drive, which is parallel to Grange Drive and in the same neighborhood as Zuppke Drive and George Huff Drive. When you were growing up, did you make the connection of these names to Illini lore?

I did because I sat around the table with two parents (Dick and Marilyn) who attended the U of I in the early ’50s and I had grandparents who attended the U of I in the ’20s. At many of our gatherings we would talk about the role that some of these people played. When I was young, Charlie Pond was still a big part of the U of I. My Mom and Dad would talk about the great success that he had. My own coach, Dick Mulvihill, was a protege of Charlie’s.

Part of my desire and passion to go to the U of I was that I could bring something to this story about the beginning of women’s athletics. I speak with deep respect for the fact that other women had opportunities to do sport but not on the competitive and sanctioned level that was now, all of a sudden, opening up. So, for me, part of my narrative was this hope of going to my school, my hometown school … could I do something that would help build back that culture of excellence and that culture of success.

I knew I was one of two Olympians to participate in this next chapter of women in sports. I wanted more to come to the U of I and try to be a part of something on the ground level than to delay my freshman year and train for the ’76 Olympics. That was the decision I made in ’75.

As pre-teens, many young girls aren’t all that far removed from playing with dolls and watching cartoons. So how old were you when gymnastics entered your routine?

I had some sort of gymnastics lessons from a ballet teacher here in Urbana when I was six. Our YMCA (McKinley) had the gymnastics program that Dick Mulvihill started and I began that at age eight. In some ways, my experience with competitive sports is an anomaly when you look at this great big, grand picture of the development of women’s sports.

If you look at the Olympic level, you already had some programs for women in track and field, swimming and diving, and a few other sports. So those sports, even though they weren’t necessarily being administered through a collegiate lens, were a bit more developed in terms of opportunities for women. At age 11—right after the ’68 Olympics—Dick Mulvihill sat me down in the gym (in the basement of Lincoln Square). I remember the conversation. He said, ‘Nancy, you’re 11, but in four years you’ll be old enough to go to the Olympics. I think you can go, but this is what it’s going to take.’ And at 11, I kind of was answering that question.

My sister Ann, who’s nine years younger than me, is actually the best athlete in the family. She graduated from high school in 1984, so she got to experience on a high school level much more the development of women’s sports. My sister, Suzie, ran track at Urbana in those beginning years of competitive sports. She went to Indiana and she and four others are the women who demanded a women’s track team at Indiana University. They got the women’s track team started under Sam Bell. So we have a lot of stories in our family about those years and how it affected the three girls in our family.

Because you were so young, did gymnastics steal away any of your childhood?

That’s a good question to ask a 64-year-old. For 60 years of my life, I’ve always said ‘Heavens no. It didn’t steal it … it enhanced it.’ Maybe I say that because I had parents who were so committed to my life beyond gymnastics.

In our family, gymnastics was always seen through a lens of ‘How is this going to enhance our lives?’ Not just mine, but also my siblings’ and my parents’ lives. While it wasn’t always in the budget to take everyone to every meet, we were always taking advantage of those meets.

One meet that was in Philadelphia in which I competed—USA versus the French National Team—my brother, David, went along because he was studying French at Urbana High School. He loved the experience as much as I did. Then, my sister, Suzie, traveled to Oregon with me when I was training there. My parents always did whatever they could to make my experiences enhance all of our lives.

I don’t know that gymnastics necessarily stole my childhood away. I’ve often been asked to talk to young women and I will often use a phrase to begin my talk … about if my 64-year-old self could talk to my 15-year-old self. Of course, there are always things that I would do differently, but I think it opened up doors and sent me places that I never, ever would have gone. I’m so grateful for that.

Gymnastics allowed you to travel world-wide … unbelievable experiences, right?

I often will describe my gymnastics experience a little bit like a Forest Gump (metaphor). Until the day he died, Dick Mulvihill would describe me as the one Olympian that he trained that walked into the gym with two left feet. I think he saw me as sort of this challenge as someone who people thought could never make it to the Olympics.

I was never the star. Even on our local YMCA team, I was number four, five or six on the team. Though I worked hard, I made the Olympic Team in ’72 because some of those ahead of me got injured or decided to be done. I kept moving up the ranks and there was a spot for me. When I think about going to the Soviet Union and South Africa and the (1973) event that happened with the Chinese piano player, all of those were brushes with a much bigger story than my own. It’s probably one of the reasons why I went into history and journalism in college because those stories were so fascinating to me.

In the ’70s, so much was happening within the narrative of Apartheid and the Cold War and the opening of relationships with China. And after my sophomore year when I retired from competitive gymnasts, I stepped into my work (as an analyst) with NBC Sports. We made several trips to Eastern Bloc countries—Romania, Hungary, three trips to China—so this really gave me a sense of what was happening. I always talk about being a tree in the middle of a story about a forest, and the story about the forest was a whole lot more fascinating than the story about the tree. But you need the trees to make the forest. Whether it was traveling the world or my time at the U of I, it was always with the question about which is the bigger picture.

It’s not about me winning medals or the Big Ten championship. I realize that the university can’t officially recognize it, but I have a trophy that shows that my team was the first Big Ten women’s championship team for the U of I. That is a bigger story to me than personally.

Not many people of today’s era recall the names Jan Fauntz, Linda Metheny, Colleen Mulvihill and Diane Bolin, but they’re all U of I grads who were U.S. Olympians. Furthermore, most of them were great influences on you … correct?

Yes, especially Linda, Diane and Colleen. They were my mentors, my heroes, my role models. They were the three from my own personal team that made the Olympic Team in ’68. And that’s why when Dick sat me down at age 11 and said ‘You can make an Olympic Team’, that didn’t sound like hogwash to me. He was infusing in me a vision that was so much bigger than what I myself thought I was or what I could do. Knowing that those four were women that attended the U of I and who competed in the Olympics prior to me. They didn’t even have a chance to compete in college. For me, I got that choice.

It was an interesting entry into the world of college athletics. There was a lot of promotion about the fact that women were now going to receive scholarships. I was very excited about that. I was still on the national team in 1975 when I said that I wanted to compete at the U of I. But the understanding at that time was that as a freshman you had to prove yourself before you could receive that scholarship. So, the first time I could get it was my sophomore year and it wasn’t anything more than a tuition scholarship. I remember that conversation between me and Karol Kahrs and (coach) Allison Milburn. I remember it being a little bit of a sting and just because the U of I was going to have a team didn’t mean that this was a well-oiled machine. Everyone was finding their way, including Karol Kahrs. She and I had some hard conversations during those years.

At the 1972 Olympics, you we’re all of 15. How did your parents and your coaches prepare you for those bright lights?

One of the benefits I had, of course, was Dick Mulvihill. He had coached Olympians on the ’64 and ’68 teams. On a pretty regular basis, somebody was coming back (to Urbana) from an international competition. We used to spend hours in the basement of Don Clegg, who was an amateur film maker. He would come to our gym and he would film us, and he would also go to world championships and Olympic competitions and film those. He had a film-viewing room in his basement. We’d go watch those films with Dick, frame-by-frame, pointing out what some world champion gymnast from the Soviet Union or East Germany or Czechoslovakia was doing with her arms.

From a training perspective, the language that was always used was ‘Well, when you get to Munich’ or ‘This is what you will do at the Trials.’ It was very matter-of-fact. When I look back on it, I think ‘Oh, my gosh, I was 15 and I was up on a podium, performing by myself.’ But when I was there (at the Olympics), we had talked so much about it and nobody had trained harder than the gymnasts from McKinley YMCA. Everybody knew it. We were the Béla Károlyi coached team of the ’70s. We were a well-oiled machine, ready for intense competition.

I remember that the training camp was in New Haven, Conn. We were there for four weeks. At night, I started dreaming that I was sleeping on the balance beam because we had spent so much time on the beam I felt like I really could sleep on it. It was just part of me.

This past year when Simone Biles went through so much, when she came back to do the balance beam. If you look at the video of her performance, she stands there and she has her hands above the beam for just a few seconds and then she puts her hands on the beam. Any gymnast who has been at the Olympics and competed, I could feel what she felt. You’re up on a podium at a very large arena and feeling really small. Then you add all of the layers of her story on top of that. She walked up those steps and stood on that podium and she put her hands on the beam and she started her routine. I said to myself at the time, ‘She’s done it … she’s won.’ Not because of what kind of medal she was going to get but the pressure of being in that place at that time and the ability to say ‘I’m going to beat the beast.’ I just have so much respect for her. That was great courage. For me, I just had to get up and do what I practiced a million times. I didn’t have the weight of a COVID delay and expectations and issues that were messing with your equilibrium, not to mention everything she went through with the Larry Nassar story.

And then, a few years ago, you were honored as a charter class member of the Illini Hall of Fame … the same class that included Boudreau and Grange and Huff and Zuppke. That had to be sort of a full-circle moment for you.

It was. When Josh Whitman called me with the news, I just sat there in awe, feeling extremely honored. I knew that they wanted to have some women in that first class. There have been so many amazing women athletes who’ve come through the U of I, so I felt very honored.