Word: champion
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...DIED. ELENI IOANNOU, 20, three-time Greek judo champion; of an apparent suicide attempt on August 7; in Athens, Greece. The first-time Olympian jumped off a third-floor balcony after quarreling with her boyfriend, kickboxer Yiorgos Chrysostomidis, just hours before she was to enter the athletes' Village. Chrysostomidis later jumped from the same balcony but survived. Ioannou took up judo only about four years ago but won bronze at the Balkan Games in 2003. She will be buried in the outfit she would have worn to the Olympic opening ceremonies...
...Israel, the victory was a salve for not only its painful history but also a politically fraught incident in the Games' first week. Iranian champion judoist Arash Miresmaeili, a medal favorite in the under 66-kg class, had been drawn to fight Israeli Ehud Vaks, but failed to make weight. Questions swirled about how a veteran like Miresmaeili could let this happen. Then he told a newspaper back home that it was no accident: "I refused to fight my Israeli opponent to sympathize with the suffering of the Palestinian people...
...build a dream team by 2008." A day earlier, in the choke performance of the week, China's male gymnastics team tumbled from gold-medal shoo-in to fifth-place finisher. The disastrous showing owed largely to the mishaps of one 19-year-old Olympic newcomer, pommel-horse world champion Teng Haibin, who, in rapid succession, stepped twice out of bounds in the floor routine, slipped on the parallel bars and, in a crowning, cataclysmic moment, swung himself right off the high...
...athlete who won, I was happy," said the elder Tsukahara. "But as a father, I am proud. And that emotion is even more powerful than just happiness." Clutching her son's victory bouquet in one hand and a bunch of bananas in the other, in case the champion needed a postcompetition potassium boost, Naoya's mother confided: "Back in 1976, I had this dream that Japan would win gold, and they did. Then, just before we left for Athens, I had another dream, where I heard the Kimigayo [the Japanese national anthem]. So I knew that we would taste success...
Unfortunately, nothing is ever quite that easy in Athens. The evening before the ceremony, Greece's two most celebrated athletes--200-m Olympic champion Konstantinos Kenteris and 100-m silver medalist Katerina Thanou--missed their mandatory drug tests and were suspended by the Hellenic Olympic Committee (H.O.C.) pending an International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.) investigation. For Greeks, it was a shocking front-page horror story. I.O.C. officials say notices were posted on the athletes' doors in the Olympic Village alerting them to the 6:15 p.m. test, and that doctors waited more than an hour before declaring them no-shows...