Word: looping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first, short-track skating looks less like a sport than a kung-fu gang war on ice, the combatants wielding giant switchblades with their feet. Skaters jostle and bump around the perpetual curves of the 111-meter loop, and when one loses a jot of control, three are likely to careen across the water- slickened ice. But as Olympic spectators have seen, short-track racing is an intricate sport, replete with complex strategies. Since up to six skaters start at once, it has the drama of a pack of competitors struggling cheek to cheek -- battle like it oughta...
Words flutter in his air like seabirds. Tern. There's a word. A noun. The Captain adores all nouns, proper and improper. A proper noun is a metaphor, observes the Captain, feeling very much the master of his bark. Bark! Noun- verb. Verbs are the best. Bray. Loop. Whir. In his captain's chair, the Captain sits every morning, pen in hand, happy as a clam, happier than any fisherman casting for trout. Trout! Is this the life? Captain Midlife asks unrhetorically, gazing about him with an astonishingly stupid grin...
...Reagan might have been better off had 1980 Campaign Director Bill Casey, a renowned Wall Street buccaneer, been left there rather than given the CIA as spoils. Jimmy Carter's sad history might have been different had he kept his campaign strategist Hamilton Jordan out of the White House loop. And John Mitchell, Richard Nixon's campaign head and later Attorney General, was such a misfit in power that he ended up in prison...
Last month Leaver announced that Boitano would not try the jump for which he is best known, the quadruple toe loop, at the Olympics. Never performed successfully in competition, the quad has become the slippery grail of skating. Boitano practices it daily and hits almost 100% of the time. But in competition, he has thrown it -- and blown it -- four times, most noticeably at the 1987 world championship. Leaver sees little point in risking another disaster when Boitano already has what is considered the most technically difficult program ever and can score 6.0s without the quad. Boitano finds...
...third of five triples, the especially treacherous one, is something called a triple Salchow-double toe loop combination. Twice in a row now, including at the nationals, she has abbreviated it. "I don't know why I chicken out. A lot of times in practice, you'll take off completely crooked on a hard jump and still land it. If you trust your nerve as well as your skill, you're capable of a lot more than you imagine. I'm going to land that one in the Olympics . . . if it kills...