Word: didrikson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...nine-year winning streak to 111 races; Cheryl Miller led the U.S. women's basketball team to an 83-60 victory over the Soviets; Dasher Evelyn Ashford, 29, held off East Germany's Heike Drechsler, 21, for another day; Jackie Joyner became the first U.S. woman since Babe Didrikson Zaharias to hold the world record in a multiple-discipline event...
There have always been women heroines at the Olympics, but they were seen as the exceptions. Although Babe Didrikson at 20 commanded the 1932 Games, she was nicknamed "Muscle Moll" and treated as some kind of miracle instead of a person who had been in training for ten years. In 1960, after Wilma Rudolph astonished the world by winning three gold medals, the press expressed surprise that off the track she wore skirts...
Last Saturday the ritual was re-enacted, enlarged considerably from the 39 nations in 1932 to 140 this year. The players were new; no Babe Didrikson to marvel at. (When the Babe, who had mastered a dozen sports, was asked if there was anything she did not play, she said, "Yeah. Dolls.") The audience for the Games promises to be up a bit: 510,000 in 1932, more than 2 billion now. Saturday's show was brighter, brassier. Still the basic ceremony held its ground. All the excitement generated by seeing the stairway ascend to the Coliseum torch...
DIED. George Zaharias, 76, huge, exuberant, cauliflower-eared professional wrestler who gave up his own highly successful career to manage that of his wife, Mildred ("Babe") Didrikson Zaharias, the top all-round woman athlete in the world until her death of cancer in 1956; of kidney and heart disease; in Tampa...