Word: kitajima
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...them gold - better than Athens' collection of 28, though not quite up to the horde of 43 that Mark Spitz's team amassed in 1972. But none of the athletes in the pool, American or otherwise, stood a chance of eclipsing Phelps. Taehwan Park of Korea and Kosuke Kitajima of Japan both snared Olympic titles and set a new standard for Asian swimmers at the élite level, but no other Olympian could come close to the frenzy that Phelps generated in the Water Cube, luring luminaries from two Presidents (George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush) to LeBron James...
...side, by ending the competition with a world-record win in the medley relay and taking home three more golds than it did in 2000. It was a spectacular week of racing, in which tight match-ups crowned first-time Olympic champions like Japan's Kosuke Kitajima and France's Laure Manaudou, and the fast fields proved too much for golden oldies like Russia's Alexander Popov...
...Later in the week, the 21-year-old heartthrob with the intense eyes and chiseled chest captured another title in the 200-m breaststroke race. But Kitajima was hardly alone in harvesting laurels for his nation. After less than a week of competition, Japan had more than doubled its total golden haul from Sydney and had claimed the No. 3 spot in the overall gold-medal tally, trailing only the U.S. and China. In the marquee swimming races, Japan's men won four medals?four more than in Sydney, where their squad sank without a trace. The country's female...
...gymnastics gold at five consecutive Olympics, the last at the 1976 Montr?al Games. In swimming, for that matter, the country bagged 12 medals way back in 1932, five of them gold. "We're just getting back to where we were before, when we were a strong swimming nation," says Kitajima, who attributes the Olympic squad's splashy performance in Athens to their extensive technical analysis of such things as wave resistance. "I think there's a sense that we're matching our past, not surging ahead...
...Kitajima, with his aggressive slices through the water, is hardly a subservient stereotype. In the pool's biggest spat to date, American Aaron Piersol accused the Japanese swimmer of using an illegal dolphin kick in the 100-m breaststroke, thereby relegating Piersol's friend and fellow American Brendan Hansen to a silver. Instead of quietly turning away from the controversy, Kitajima fought back, albeit in an understated way: "The questions got me slightly angry," he told reporters, noting that he had never been warned about any prohibited kicks in previous international competitions. "But I don't take them seriously." Regardless...