Word: champion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...airport immigration agent was suspicious when Senior Writer Tom Callahan landed in London to interview Daley Thompson, Britain's two-time Olympic decathlon champion. "Does he know you're coming?" asked the agent, pointing out Thompson's notorious avoidance of the press. "He doesn't give interviews, you know." He did to Callahan, and the result is part of our special section on the Summer Games of the XXIV Olympiad in Seoul...
Shot-Putter Lisovskaya, a prime example of the Soviet approach, began her programmed life at a "sports-oriented" school in her native Tashkent at age seven. She was spotted as a potential champion at 14. Coach Faina Melnik saw her during a scouting trip and persuaded her to move to Moscow as soon as she finished high school. A discus thrower at the time, she tried the shot at Melnik's suggestion and soon switched, a daring decision for an athlete already in her late teens. Within four years, helped by careful coaching and a training regimen...
Story is far from alone. Robert Nieman, 40, is a former world champion in pentathlon, the sport that combines running, swimming, shooting, fencing and horseback riding. Jobless while training, he relies on "the fact that my wife has a very good job." Adds Nieman: "McDonald's gave us some free hamburgers. That's big time in pentathlon...
Fate works in quirky ways. Five years ago, Soviet Dmitri Bilozerchev, just 16, won the all-around title at the world gymnastics championships in Budapest with an astounding 59.85 points out of 60. The youngest male champion in the history of the sport, he performed routines of exquisite difficulty with a mature, polished technique, though his prime was still years away. "At music schools, they say of such children that they have the absolute sense of pitch," says his coach, Aleksandr Aleksandrov. "With Dmitri, he has the absolute sense of the art of gymnastics...
Defending Ivy League champion Harvard has beaten Columbia in nine straight games. The Crimson has blanked the Lions the past two years...