Word: goldings
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...changed her name last December when she married Japanese pro baseball player and fellow Olympian Yoshimoto Tani in a $3 million Paris wedding that was televised across Japan. Tani's popularity in her home country is as outsized as she is pint-sized, but that only makes the gold-medal pressure on the 1.46-m judoka all the more intense. She was upset in the 1992 and 1996 Games, having to settle for silver on each occasion. At Sydney in 2000, she told reporters she wanted "at best, a gold. At worst, a gold." It was the best of times...
...Since then, Tani has marched to a record sixth straight world championship, and at age 28, remains the preeminent female judoka of her era. A heel injury suffered just a month before the Olympics will make her quest for another gold the most difficult of her career, but Tani's competitiveness has trumped physical pain repeatedly in the past. "She is a born fighter," says Yasuhiro Muto, a judo writer for the Tokyo Chunichi Sports newspaper. "She is a contestant who hates losing. She changes color when it comes to a match...
...have served him well. His college coach, Hidetoshi Nakanishi, remembers seeing Inoue for the first time as an 11-year-old, practicing each day until his coaches would force him to stop. Even then, Nakanishi says, "I knew he was someone to be looking forward to." Nonetheless, Inoue's gold-medal-winning performance at Sydney was a shock. To earn first place, judokas have to win five straight matches in a single day, which can take up to 25 minutes of fighting. Inoue won all of his matches by ippon (knockout) in a total of six minutes...
...Taekwondo. Even though the sport has eight weight classes in the Olympics, each qualifying country is allowed to send only four athletes at most, presumably so Koreans can't monopolize the medal stands. For most South Korean Taekwondo fighters, then, the real challenge isn't just earning the gold: it's defeating fellow countrymen to qualify for the Olympics in the first place. Four years ago, for example, heavyweight Moon Dae Sung missed the Olympics after losing a last-minute rematch during national selections. He made the team this time around, and in Athens he'll be looking...
...with the rest of the world increasingly embracing the sport, Korea's Taekwondo fighters can no longer afford to be complacent. China's Wei Luo, who swept to a convincing gold in the 2003 world championships, looks likely to beat South Korean Hwang Kyung Sun in the 67-kg women's event, while Taiwan's Chu Mu Yen and Chen Chih Hsin are both strong gold-medal contenders. "In the case of Europeans and some Asian athletes, there is no skill difference compared with us," South Korean Taekwondo coach Kim Sae Hyeock told the JoongAng Daily. "It's just...