Word: longing
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...snare that elusive gold, in the individual "large hill" competition. "I'm not surprised," says Tomas Slavik, a Nordic combined athlete from the Czech Republic, of the U.S. performance. "Bill [Demong], Johnny [Spillane] and Todd [Lodwick] came up together as juniors and have been doing this for a long time. America is a force." Now when they trek through Europe on the Nordic combined circuit, the skiers can leave the sleeping bags at home. And they won't have to flee the bagman...
...have been concentrating on the ice dancing in Vancouver. Or you're one of those people who can't tell a silly mid-off from a backward square-leg. So it's possible you missed the breaking of one of sport's long-standing barriers: India's Sachin Tendulkar scored a double-hundred against South Africa in a one-day match on Feb. 24, 2010. For the 1.5 billion people who follow cricket - making it, by some reckoning, the world's second most popular sport after soccer - it was a moment to match Roger Bannister's 4-min. mile...
...understand why the mark was long thought impossible, consider the odds against it happening. In a one-day game, each side gets to bat 50 six-ball overs - that's 300 balls or, in American baseball terms, "pitches." It's rare that a single batsman gets more than 150 pitches, so the batsman would need a hit rate higher than 100% to get to 200 runs. Tendulkar got his 200 runs in 147 pitches, a hitting rate of 136.5. Very few players have scored at a faster rate, and none had the combination of patience and skill to score fast...
...entirely appropriate that the record should fall to Tendulkar, 36, the greatest run scorer of all time, as he roars into the autumn of a storied career. Cricketers very rarely play into their 40s, and most are long past their record-breaking age at 35. But the Little Master, as his fans know him, is as bright at twilight as he was at noon: he's ratcheted up a string of recent big scores in both the five-day "Test" and one-day versions of the sport, giving a new generation of bowlers the privilege of a Tendulkar thrashing...
...nature of sport that records don't last forever. Hundreds of middle-distance runners can now do the mile in less than 4 min. It won't be long before other batsmen reach and exceed the 200-run mark; there are at least a half-dozen in the modern game who have both the power and stamina to pull it off any day of the week. But history will never forget the Bannisters and Tendulkars for proving that the only barriers are in our minds...