Word: golds
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...certainly its perkiest. A former college star at UCLA, she continued to play through medical school, and now works as an orthopedic surgeon. To train for the Olympics, she took a one-year leave of absence from her residency at the University of Southern California; two days after the gold-medal victory, she returned to her rounds at the hospital. Or at least tried to. The hospital held a congratulatory press conference; the USC band serenaded her outside the hospital; and she got a standing ovation at Dodger stadium. The celebration continues this week with a trip to Disney World...
...hard-throwing 10-year-old growing up in Orlando, Florida, Dot Richardson wanted to play Little League baseball. But a coach said she'd have to cut her hair first and call herself Bob. Dot passed up that invitation and opted for girls' softball instead. Two decades and a gold medal later, she notes that things have improved for sports-minded girls. "You can see the change in women's athletics," she says. "Young girls today have more opportunities than I ever...
Richardson had her opportunity in the third inning of the gold-medal game between the U.S. and China. With a runner on first in a scoreless game, she lifted a fly ball deep down the right-field line. As it sailed toward the foul pole, the exuberant 5-ft. 5-in. shortstop crouched low on the base path (so the home-plate umpire could see better, she later explained), then leaped in the air as the ball was ruled fair. The Chinese team disputed the call for 10 minutes, to no avail, and the homer provided the winning...
...less glamorous team efforts), but sisterhood was powerful at the Atlanta Games. Sparked by Richardson, and by dominating pitching from Lisa Fernandez and Michele Granger, the U.S. softball team survived some low-scoring squeakers (and a 2-1 loss to Australia in extra innings) to capture the first Olympic gold medal ever awarded in the sport. The U.S. women's soccer team also dispatched the world's top teams, including Norway (which had beaten them in last year's world championships) and China in a hard fought 2-1 final, on the way to America's first soccer gold medal...
...festival of youth, in which college-age dreamers come to live in dorms, meet new friends and learn about the world. And, in doing so, they teach us about the four other Olympic qualities that the fairy-tale Olympian mythically has to conquer: excellence (in the heroic third-straight gold of 4-ft. 11-in. Turkish weight lifter Naim Suleymanoglu); integrity (in the radiant face of Jonathan Edwards, the British triple jumper who said he was thrilled to get silver and made you believe it); sportsmanship (in the tears of American Lindsay Davenport after she beat her "very best friend...