Word: janica
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Dates: during 2002-2002
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Female skier Janica Kostelic, who won four medals for Croatia, will return to her country as the toast of Zagreb. In America, we may appreciate all of our athletes, but we just have too many. One gold medal here or there only gains so much attention...
Last September Janica Kostelic wondered if she would be skiing well enough to make any impression at the Olympics. After three knee operations in the off-season, the 2001 overall World Cup champion was going to have to fight to be fit. Last week her fears proved unfounded as she became the first alpine skier to win four Olympic medals at a single Games. And three of those were gold...
...pick a favorite foreigner it would be Janica Kostelic, whose story might be the most compelling of the Games. She and her brother, who also competed here, grew up poor in Zagreb when it was part of Yugoslavia. Their dad drove them to the hill when he could. They became champions, but Janica's career was constantly interrupted by injury; she's had three knee surgeries in the past few years. She came in here hoping for perhaps one medal, any shade. She left with four, three of them gold. No skier had ever won so many and no woman...
...didn't always seem that they would develop such a passion for the sport. Janica was only three when she first put on skis, but her mother later recalled that she didn't seem to be a natural: "She was falling all the time and getting in the way of all the other kids on the slope. We thought she'd never learn." In the early 1990s Ante started taking the children to junior ski races around Europe. Money was so short that they slept in tents, or in their car when the weather got too cold, and Janica missed...
...haveJust in case you've forgotten been thin but she still won races. During the 1996-97 season Janica won all 22 junior races she entered. Despite that impressive record, in her first World Cup season, 1998-99, her third place in a slalom event at Park City, Utah, took officials by surprise. They couldn't find a Croatian flag for the award ceremony and Janica...