Word: gate
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...number of athletes were also discovering something about life's talent for surprise. Canada's Ken Read, a favorite to win the most important ski race in the world, the Olympic men's downhill, pitched himself out of the starting gate and 15 seconds into his run, felt the safety binding on his left ski let go. Read parted with the ski and the potential gold he had spent years training for. The men's downhill winner was just as unpredictable: Austria's Leonhard Stock, the 21-year-old Tyrol farmer...
...American pursuit of gold went haltingly at first. Although Pete Patterson finished an unexpected fifth in the downhill, Karl Anderson tumbled spectacularly just out of the gate, and Phil Mahre, considered the best U.S. skier, managed only a 14th. Bill Koch, 24, who surprised the world with a silver medal in the 30-km cross-country four years ago at Innsbruck, surprised it again. With 8 km to go, Koch found himself back in 23rd position and, rather than finish exhausted, dropped out and skied off through the forest. He hoped to save energy for the 15-km event...
Stock started ninth in a race that any one of four or five men could have taken. The time to beat was the 1:47.13 set by Italy's Herbert Plank. With four fast jolts of his ski poles, Stock propelled himself out of the starting gate and launched into the knifing and chittering switchback turns at the course's top. He shot through them with a wildly debonair angling, self-assured, and then, as the course got straighter and rougher, he bounced several times violently for an instant as if he had lost everything, his limbs doing...
...instrument fitters, engine installers and wheel mounters cleaned up quietly and left. When the line finally came to a halt, nothing dramatic followed, no mass exodus, not even a final silence. Plant officials gathered around the blue Aspen for photographs, then drifted to the windows overlooking the Bismarck Gate to watch television crews clustered around departing workers, striving to capture their final mood-solemnity, or fear, or anger...
Today there is nothing to do but collect pay. Wanda Paruch, whose blond hair and broad pleasant face belie her 52 years, is only one of hundreds lining up early outside the gate on Joseph Campau Avenue, Hamtramck's main street, in the subfreezing, clear morning air. She waves to old friends as they drift off, feeling only an elusive, half-real sense of loss. Above her loom massive gray factory walls with their vast mosaic of windows, painted-over green, cracked and dirty. Only one of the four black smokestacks exhales into the sky. The railroad tunnels that...