Early in her 1996 motivational book Finding
the Champion Within, Olympic Gold Medalist Caitlyn Jenner expresses her
devotion to “My lovely wife, Kris.”
“When we met on September 10, 1990, my life had lost direction,” Jenner
writes. “But it’s amazing what one person can awaken in another.”
Finding
the Champion Within: A Step-By-Step Plan for Reaching Your Full Potential allowed
Jenner the opportunity to advise readers on the decathlon of life and how they,
like the author, can achieve success.
The Olympic decathlon games consist of ten grueling track and field
competitions over two days. Athletes compete in long jump, shot put, high jump,
javelin throw, pole vault, discus, and other contests. Caitlyn Jenner (known as
Bruce Jenner until 2015) won the Gold Medal for the United States at the 1976
Olympic Games in Montreal.
Other famous American Gold Medalists in the decathlon include Jim Thorpe
in 1912, Bob Mathias in 1948 and 1952, and Rafer Johnson in 1960. By Olympic
tradition, decathlon winners are proclaimed the World’s Greatest Athletes.
Of the ten decathlon events, Jenner scored higher than 22 competitors,
with an overall score of 8,634 points. Her nearest opponent, from the Federal
Republic of Germany, the former East Germany, scored 8,411 points.
Jenner writes she moved from being a “dreamer” to someone obsessed with “doing”
whatever it took to be a champion. Jenner discovered the minute she decided to
be an Olympic champion, at 22, and made the commitment to do the work necessary
to get there, “I was a different human being.”
The decathlon, Jenner writes, is “one of the toughest endurance tests in
sports.” She was so dedicated to winning the Gold medal, “I devoted every hour
of every day, 365 days a year, to training for the games, excluding everything
else, until I had won each event a thousand times in my mind.”
Jenner never stopped running the decathlon races until “the evening of
July 30, 1976, when … I stood atop the winner’s platform, receiving the Gold
medal.” It was especially meaningful to her to win the Gold in America’s
Bicentennial year. It was an accomplishment that earned Jenner a White House
invitation from President Gerald R. Ford.
By 1990, Jenner writes she “was a relic from the era of Farrah (Fawcett
Majors) and comedian Flip (Wilson), sports announcer Howard Cosell and footballer
Joe Namath, lost in the world of Tom Cruise and Bob Costas.” She lived in the
Los Angeles Hills in a one-bedroom bungalow “where dirty dishes filled the
kitchen sink.”
Jenner had not only lost direction, she had two failed marriages and
felt unattractive at 40. She “spent thousands of dollars ... for a nose job,
only to have the surgeon botch it so badly he had to do it over again.”
Life for the Gold medalist got worse. “I had grown accustomed to a life
without: without intimacy, without excitement, without adventure, without
growth,” she writes. Her Olympic Gold medal she worked so hard for was hidden
in her sock drawer. It was, to her, a symbol of “how much I’d lost.”
Jenner’s message to readers is, “wherever you are in your own life, no
matter how low you’ve sunk, I can empathize. I’ve been there. I had given up. I
had lost my will.”
Life and soul mate Kris came into Jenner’s life and turned Jenner
around. She again experienced the power and dedication to be a champion. She
would focus exclusively on her goal “until the prize was mine.”
Jenner penned ten motivational chapters based on each decathlon event.
In the course, we learn she is dyslexic and a slow reader in school, which made
her feel a failure. By fifth grade, Jenner demonstrated athletic abilities that
set her apart from other kids.
Finding
the Champion Within is filled with lists, quotations, motivational
stories, and Jenner’s personal life, circa 1996 and before. The quotes and
motivational stories appear in many other books and by the original speakers
now on YouTube.
Still, Jenner writes with enthusiasm and held her reader’s interest;
especially when she writes about feeling unattractive with no relationships, no
money, and being the ridiculed subject of trash journalism from rag newspapers.
Given Jenner’s highly public life and reality TV show with her Kardashian
family and the news of 2015 she has transitioned to female, Finding the Champion Within takes on new
and important meaning. Her book is intended to motivate readers to achieve some
form of personal success and to establish Jenner as a motivator/coach/teacher
to help people find personal growth and change.
Caitlyn Jenner found the personal strength to become an Olympic Gold
Medalist in 1976. Jenner found strength in her relationship with third wife
Kris to pull herself back into a champion frame of mind to confront a lifelong
personal challenge to live openly as a woman.
In 2015, Jenner is a fresh champion with a fresh message that gives new
meaning to the oft-used motivational lists, quotations, and stories used in her
book. Jenner uses these familiar devices to get to a far bigger point of
accepting oneself, conquering barriers to growth and change, and living the
life of a new champion for a new era.
Human Rights Advocate Jim Patterson is a writer, speaker, and lifelong
diplomat for dignity for all people. In a remarkable life spanning the civil
rights movement to today’s human rights struggles, he stands as a voice for the
voiceless. A prolific writer, he documents hertory’s wrongs and the struggle
for dignity to provide a roadmap to a more humane future. Learn more at www.HumanRightsIssues.com.
