When Kathy Johnson Clarke was a gymnast contemplating the end of her career, she had three conditions. First, she didn’t want to quit; she wanted to retire on her own terms. Second, she didn’t want to stay too long. And third, she didn’t want to fall out of love with the sport.
Looking back on her career it’s clear she fulfilled all three. She retired from the sport as an Olympic bronze medalist on balance beam after the 1984 Los Angeles Games, returning home with a silver team medal to boot.
Her Olympic glory, however, wasn’t without its setbacks and challenges. Prior to her success, she narrowly missed making the 1976 Olympic team, and despite making it in 1980, was unable to compete; it was the depths of the Cold War, and the United States boycotted the Moscow-hosted games. She was able to come back from that disappointment and have a successful performance at the 1983 World Championships. Throughout her career, she persisted through a series of injuries, an eating disorder, and what she repeatedly referred to as coaching trauma. And then finally, she fulfilled her Olympic dream.
After the 1984 Games, she knew it was time. She had accomplished her goals at the sport’s highest level. She was a national champion, a world medalist, and now, an Olympic medalist.
She still loved the sport, though she could not know how she would transform it, and its reputation, through her next steps.
Johnson Clarke’s broadcast career happened, she said, “entirely serendipitously.” In 1983, she was training at SCATS in California under Don Peters, with World Championship trials around the corner and the Olympics on the horizon.
She got a call from CBS that spring. Would she be interested in calling the NCAA gymnastics championships in Salt Lake City?
“My coach’s knee-jerk reaction was ‘hell no,'” she recalled. Johnson Clarke was coming back from a toe injury that had hobbled her for nine months and nearly ended her athletic career. She needed the time in the gym.
But shortly thereafter, Peters changed his tune. He told Johnson Clarke that broadcasting might very well be her post-gymnastics career and that she should take the opportunity. He told her she needed to keep training, warned her not to get injured, and sent her off to Utah.
At the time, the commentary was prepared in advance for a taped show. This allowed Johnson Clarke to hit the podium with the competitors. “I trained on the equipment that day, went back, showered, got dressed, and came back and did my broadcast,” she said. Both she and Peters thought that was the end of it. Training continued. Two weeks later, she was summoned to New York to do a voiceover. And the following year, during the Olympic buildup, she was asked to call the NCAA championships again.
“That year, they were in Pauley Pavilion at UCLA,” she said. “I was training in Huntington Beach, so it was just a drive up the 405.” That year she also covered the men’s competition, and Mitch Gaylord, who won the all-around that year and would go on to compete at the Olympics alongside Johnson Clarke, kissed her cheek on air while greeting her. “I looked at the camera, and I laughed—and they stayed on me,” she said. “Good lord, what you can find on YouTube now.”
She would go on to cover the NCAA championships for CBS Sports for the next several years. She partnered with Bart Conner, another 1984 Olympic teammate, to cover the Pan American Games as well. The duo worked for NBC and for ESPN, at the time an up-and-coming cable channel. She also covered the Goodwill Games for TBS. She recalled wearing the same blue blazer for every job and keeping interchangeable patches, one for each network, in her bag at all times.
Then in 1990, ABC came calling. At the time, ABC covered most elite gymnastics competitions as well as the Olympics. Conner had worked there for a year before Johnson Clarke was brought in to fill in for Cathy Rigby during the 1989 World Championships. They made a good team. So good, in fact, that Conner and Johnson Clarke worked together at ABC for eight years.
In March of 1998, toward the end of her time with the channel, Johnson Clarke gave birth to her son, Sean. When Sean was six weeks old, her team was planning its coverage of the European Championships in St. Petersburg, Russia. “There were three women at ABC at the time,” she said, including herself. “It was all men, all men.” Lydia Stephans, a 1984 Olympian in speedskating, had become the first female vice president at the network, overseeing programming. Johnson Clarke frantically pumped breast milk to build up a stash to hold Sean over while she traveled to Russia. Her doctor told her she could not go; she was too fresh off her c-section surgery. “I was like, it doesn’t work like that in TV,” she said.
Then Stephans approached her. Johnson Clarke recalled her saying, “May I apologize to you on behalf of ABC that you thought for two seconds that you were getting on a plane to St. Petersburg, Russia, to cover a meet instead of staying home with your baby?” Stephans had stood up to a roomful of male executives on Johnson Clarke’s behalf, chastising them for making them think she needed to go. Johnson Clarke was able to stay home.
That same year, NBC won the rights to cover the Olympics. Then, ABC lost its contract with the International Gymnastics Federation; the network offered tons of coverage, Johnson Clarke remembers, but the FIG wanted more money and ABC backed off. No more gymnastics at ABC.
“Are we retired?” Johnson Clarke asked Conner at the time.
They weren’t, but it took a few years for their broadcasting careers to pick up again. Johnson Clarke didn’t mind; Sean was young, and she enjoyed staying close to home with him.
“And then I got a call out of the blue,” Johnson Clarke said. It was from ESPN, looking for coverage for SEC gymnastics, calling three meets a year. Originally she worked with Chris Marlowe, but when he jumped to NBC, Johnson Clarke suggested Conner to replace him. And, as college gymnastics fans know, the rest is history. For a decade, the two called SEC meets together. Then in 2015, Meg Aronowitz, an ESPN executive, came up with the concept for Friday Night Heights. Aronowitz wanted the meets to air live. “The magic happened,” Johnson Clarke said.
The magic involved a little ingenuity. A few years earlier, Johnson Clarke and Conner were frustrated during the NCAA championships—which at the time featured six teams on the floor—because “you never knew who was winning,” she said. “The scores never looked right. The scoring system [was] too slow for television.” They struggled to interpret scoring in a way non-gymnasts in the audience could understand. Johnson Clarke created a program in Excel to show a team’s averaged score so audiences could see the pace the team was on even if it wasn’t on a bye.
For three years, Johnson Clarke brought her laptop with her to work. A stats person working with her and Conner would input the scores, and the program would do the rest. But Johnson Clarke lived in fear of someone hitting the wrong button, “because I can’t fix it,” she said, laughing. When Aronowitz saw the program, she was thrilled, even though Johnson Clarke warned her not to touch the laptop that was running it. Aronowitz, who according to Johnson Clarke said that the Excel program was addressing the one component missing from gymnastics broadcasts, brought in an IT team, “and they took my little program and put it on steroids,” Johnson Clarke said.
She’s still hesitant to take credit for it. “I gave birth to it,” she said, “but I didn’t raise it, I did not coach it, I did not make it as special as it is now.” But her program was at the root of what made Friday Night Heights so successful. It helped translate gymnastics’ byzantine scoring into something immediately intelligible by the audience, and the show’s popularity boomed—as did the popularity of college gymnastics as a whole.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said. “But it’s not my job to fix it, especially at the expense of a gymnast.” – Kathy Johnson Clarke
And that’s in no small part thanks to Johnson Clarke. When she was competing in the ’70s and early ’80s, Johnson Clarke said, “we used to jokingly say [college gymnastics] was where gymnasts went out to pasture.” And even though she notes some college routines in the ’80s and ’90s featured more difficulty than they do now, “it’s about balance,” she said of the current crop of college gymnasts. “They’re being smart with their bodies; they’re being smart with the code of points.” She said the sport has gotten “bigger and better” in recent years, with an emphasis on performance value.
But, she said, if judges want to reward entertainment value over execution, they need to codify that. Johnson Clarke has not been shy during her broadcast career about calling out the increasingly high scores for routines that, she says, make it difficult to differentiate between the good, the great, and the truly perfect. “We’ve got a problem,” she said. “But it’s not my job to fix it, especially at the expense of a gymnast.”
Johnson Clarke said she would love to see an NCAA-specific code of points implemented. One that would reward “risk, originality, and virtuosity.”
“Those are the three things that make gymnastics the unique sport it is,” she said, adding, “this is a DI sport. It’s a competitive sport. We want it to remain a serious sport.”
Harkening back to her favorite apparatus, beam, Johnson Clarke said that judging—both the official kind and the unofficial that exists among fans on social media—is a balance. “It’s the balance between being responsible and being passionate. And then what ties it all together is grace. We need to be able to give ourselves and give each other some grace.”
Adding to her influence, Johnson Clarke has mentored many of the commentators moving up at ESPN, including 2008 Olympian and former UCLA standout Samantha Peszek. Peszek has often referred to Johnson Clarke and Conner as her “broadcast mom and dad” throughout her time on air with the dynamic duo and calls their teamwork on-air “poetic.” She credits the depth and breadth of their planning for each broadcast with growing the sport. “We would have to say, Kathy, we’re done talking about gymnastics tonight,” Peszek recalls of her mentor’s passion for the sport.
“Whether you agree with everything she says on a call or not, it’s clear that…her level of care for the sport, the teams, and the athletes far exceeds what’s expected of a broadcaster.” – Samantha Peszek
Peszek said she was initially intimidated when she joined Johnson Clarke and Conner on air but gradually found her footing. For her part, Johnson Clarke praised Peszek’s ambition and talent. “She started by doing an interview show at UCLA, then honed her craft doing her own podcast and Pac-12 meets as an analyst. She worked as a sideline reporter—anything she could do to grow. She has done the work and built a career from the ground up.”
“There’s probably not one person that is more passionate or cares more about the integrity of the sport than Kathy,” Peszek said. “Whether you agree with everything she says on a call or not, it’s clear that…her level of care for the sport, the teams, and the athletes far exceeds what’s expected of a broadcaster.”
Peszek said that while she was not aware when she was competing at UCLA of Johnson Clarke’s calls of her routines, she has seen many on social media since—including the 2015 beam routine, the last of her career, that sealed her individual title on the event that year. “You could just tell in her voice how much she cared about my routine,” Peszek said. “I felt like she was doing the routine with me in a way.”
Asked if she wanted to say anything to her mentor, Peszek said, “I just want to say thank you. The sport of gymnastics is lucky to have had her voice and her passion for as long as we’ve had it.”
Gratitude toward Johnson Clarke was a common sentiment among coworkers, coaches, and gymnasts alike.
“You called my first 10.0,” said Trinity Thomas, the former Florida gymnast and 2022 NCAA all-around champion, in a video statement released by Florida. Thomas tied the NCAA record for 10s in 2023 with 28 perfect scores. “You bring such a light to commentary, and I want you to know how thankful we are to you.”
“You are a trailblazer, a leader, a mentor, an icon, a voice of truth,” said Florida head coach Jenny Rowland. “Thank you for your unwavering commitment to excellence in the sport.”
Auburn Head Coach Jeff Graba said, “Kathy has been an integral part of not only showcasing our phenomenal student-athletes but also growing the sport’s popularity. I’m so grateful for all Kathy has done for the sport of gymnastics and wish her nothing but the best in the future.”
Contrary to what the gymternet may have assumed this season, Johnson Clarke is not being forced out of broadcasting for having strong opinions about lenient judging. New leadership at ESPN wanted to expand its coverage, she said. “And what it created was an opportunity for everybody else to grow but put me in a situation where I can’t do my best work. I’m not even with my partner or my usual crew.”
Johnson Clarke’s schedule for this season only featured three meets, sometimes with teams she was unfamiliar with. “It’s time to hand it over and let them grow,” she said. She is proud of the roots she created at the SEC Network and on ESPN, she said, but acknowledges that it’s now time to give the product she grew its wings.
“I would have liked a more graceful way to bow out,” Johnson Clarke said. “I would have liked for it to have been my choice.” But she sees herself watching more of the sport she loves, including more elite gymnastics in this Olympic year. She plans to “just sit back and take it all in.”
Forty-one years later, Johnson Clarke’s broadcast career is ending this weekend at NCAA regionals. It was not her choice, she said, but she’s decided to own it. She will not quit before the end. She will not stay too long. And she is still madly in love with gymnastics.
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Article by Lela Moore
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