Word: decathloners
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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...
...Daley Thompson has been the natural heir to Jim Thorpe, she would be the Seoul beneficiary of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Joyner-Kersee and Thompson, the two-time Olympic decathlon champion, puffing for three, embody all the basic wonders of the Games and encompass almost every grade of emotion. One is just arriving at a place the other has been straining to maintain. She's the blur; he's the mist. They have a "special understanding," as he likes to put it, and a few things...
Thorpe won his Olympic decathlon at Stockholm in 1912. "You, sir," declared King Gustav, "are the world's greatest athlete." To which Thorpe replied with touching simplicity, "Thanks, King." Thompson has often heard the description "world's greatest athlete" -- in fact, he has been called the greatest of all time -- but has never seriously proclaimed the title. "It's merely a tag," he says. He does feel akin to Thorpe though. "We're all his descendants -- Mathias, Rafer Johnson, Jenner, me. We've all shared something. It's passed down from one to the next. It's never anyone...
...going to be the best in the world at something. My school friends used to laugh at me, but I kept searching for the thing that would express who I am. There's only one key for every lock, you know. As soon as I found the decathlon, I knew...
This is the attitude of Bill Toomey, the Olympic decathlon champion of 1968, a former World's Greatest Athlete in that long American line from Jim Thorpe to Bruce Jenner, through Bob Mathias and Rafer Johnson. But "now the decathlon is virtually made in Europe," he says. "I keep hoping there is somebody out there who could at least compete with Daley Thompson." Toomey is not inconsolable though. He knows that track, in particular, has been a missionary sport, and that many foreign stars have American universities in their backgrounds...