Word: givens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...city whose very name means capital, yet the feel of the place is oddly uncongested. Here is not just another high-rising Asian metropolis, like Hong Kong or Singapore or Taipei, but a compact and manageable place of little lanes and neighborhood stores, of tree-lined streets given a sense of space and rough lyricism by the granite hills that surround them. Nature is more in evidence here than Industry: to go from one downtown hotel to another, one drives around the side of Namsan (South Mountain...
...Story's name sounds like a joke, and it has given rise to a few: at 5 ft. 7 in., he is known as a short story, and at 36, he is an old story. Within the arcane world of team handball, where he was the U.S. hero at the 1987 Pan Am Games, he is a big story. A member of the squad since 1977, he played at the 1984 Olympics, when the team finished ninth, and is captain of the contingent going to Seoul. His sacrifices to keep playing would be almost incomprehensible to the average baby boomer...
...specializing in versatility appealed to his sense of justice and mischief. "In any walk of life, there'll always be a bloke more talented in this or that, who's smarter in some way, or richer, or faster, or just better suited. But can the thing that he was given be lined up against everything you've got?" At 6 ft. 1/2 in. and 195 lbs., much too thick and blocky for track, though not nearly brawny or flexible enough for the field, Thompson is ideally constructed for none of the ten events. "But I'm happy with my dimensions...
Unlike many other athletes, Darnyi prefers to race not against the clock but against the competition on a given day. In Seoul he will be pacing himself against California's David Wharton, 19, whose mark of 4:16.12 in the 400-meter medley is just a fraction of a second behind Darnyi's record of 4:15.42. Oddly, each man suffers from a sensory disability. Wharton is partially deaf and wears a hearing aid when on dry land. Darnyi has had only partial sight in his left eye since 1983. "We were fooling around in the snow when a snowball...
...talent, in turn, is coddled and honed. Promising grade schoolers are channeled into the country's 2,000 training centers. The best of them -- around 9,000 at any given time -- go on to some 25 residential sports schools, where 2,000 full-time trainers, plus doctors, masseurs and cooks, begin building Olympic winners...