Crowdfunding marketing campaign brings in additional than $285K for Mary Lou Retton

FAIRMONT – In summer time 1976, Mary Lou Retton was 8 years outdated – and glued to the console tv set in the lounge of her childhood dwelling on Beverly Street, on the west facet of this Marion County metropolis.

She couldn’t get sufficient of that yr’s Summer season Olympic Video games in Montreal.

Particularly, the prowess of Nadia Comaneci, the Romanian gymnast who was the primary in her sport to attain an ideal 10 in Olympic historical past.

“I wish to try this,” she stated to her mother and father, Lois and Ronnie.

Eight years later, on the age of 16 within the Summer season Video games in Los Angeles – she did.

She ended up on the Wheaties field and her hometown renamed Beverly Street to Mary Lou Retton Drive, in her honor.

Now, America is as soon as once more tumbling for the gymnast from West Virginia who captured hearts and gold in California 39 years in the past.

As of late Wednesday afternoon, greater than $285,000 had poured right into a crowdfunding marketing campaign arrange by her daughter, McKenna Kelley, to assist defray medical prices for Retton, who’s critically ailing and on a ventilator in a Texas hospital, she stated.

Her mom, now 55, is combating “a uncommon type of pneumonia,” Kelley wrote on Spotfund.com.

She’s waging that combat with out medical insurance coverage, her daughter stated in her Tuesday publish that launched the trouble.

“We ask that if you happen to may also help in any method, that 1) you PRAY! and a couple of) if you happen to might assist us funds for the hospital invoice,” that publish learn.

“ANYTHING, completely something, could be so useful for my household and my mother. Thank y’all so very a lot!”

As stated, it didn’t take lengthy – and donors posted their very own sentiments, together with their {dollars}.

“You’re a improbable individual and a task mannequin for thus many ladies,” wrote one.

“Therapeutic ideas for our nationwide treasure,” stated one other.

And one other: “I bear in mind your Olympics like yesterday, and the way thrilling it was to observe you.”

Developing in her gymnast profession, Retton wasn’t essentially enthusiastic about icon standing, she advised The Dominion Put up in 2014.

She simply needed to compete. Her brothers had been all sports activities stars at Fairmont Senior Excessive College.

Her sister was a WVU gymnastics star, in her personal proper.

And her dad, Ronnie, was a basketball standout for the state’s flagship college, as a starter on the Jerry West-led Mountaineer basketball group that just about took all of it within the 1959 NCAA event, shedding by one level to California within the closing.

After the medals

Within the mid-2000s, she and her then-husband Shannon Kelley, moved from Texas – the place she had lived since her teenagers after going full-on along with her Olympic pursuits – to her hometown, after Kelley accepted a soccer teaching place at Fairmont State College.

Retton by then had parlayed her Olympic expertise right into a profession as a nationally touring motivational speaker.

She additionally grew to become the movie star face of Mon Well being Medical Heart for a time, as that facility was the place her father had efficiently undergone open-heart surgical procedure some years earlier than.

One other teaching job took the couple again to Texas. They’ve since divorced.

In 2018, Retton competed on ABC’s in style “Dancing with the Stars” present.

Medical procedures, in the meantime, are nothing new to the elite athlete, as she advised this newspaper 9 years in the past.

By then, she had logged 15 orthopedic surgical procedures, she stated, together with two hip replacements.

Arthritis was additionally a byproduct of her Olympic journey, Retton stated.

“I’m fairly beat-up,” she stated.

“It’s what it’s. I pushed my physique past regular limits. That’s what I get for sticking my landings.”