EJ MONTINI

Caitlyn Jenner goes for the gold ... in life

EJ Montini
opinion columnist
Caitlyn Jenner

Caitlyn Jenner is brave.

I didn't think I'd ever say such a thing.

I mean, we're talking about the former Bruce Jenner, the superman of the 1976 Olympics. I was a young guy watching him on TV, when he was the all-American guy. The girls in my school swooned over him. The boys envied him. Our parents loved him. America loved him.

Or as it was reported in the The New York Daily News after Jenner's triumph: "In the great and glorious tradition of Jim Thorpe, Bob Mathias, Rafer Johnson and Bill Toomey, Bruce Jenner today won the Olympic decathlon and the gold medal and title 'World's Greatest Athlete' that goes with it. He did it with a record point total and a remarkable final burst of energy in the most enervating of the 10 events, the 1,500 meters."

Now, all these years later, I'm looking at the glamour portrait of Caitlyn Jenner as photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the June cover of Vanity Fair magazine.

It throws me off a bit. But the bottom line is this:

Bruce Jenner was a great athlete.

Caitlyn Jenner is a brave woman.

It may seem late in the game for Jenner to do something so drastic. But tough choices can take time, and avoiding them is sometimes the easiest path.

And Jenner didn't do that.

The magazine released a bit of the profile that will accompany the photographs and in one of the excerpts Jenner says, "If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, 'You just blew your entire life. You never dealt with yourself,' and I don't want that to happen."

It's a good lesson, and the kind of example not enough people follow.

Life is a decathlon.

Caitlyn Jenner is going for the gold.