Word: marksmanship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...long been famously neutral, Switzerland, as an English scholar once wrote, "has been in a state of war every weekend since 1945." The gibe has more than a little truth to it. On weekends rifle ranges around the country resound with the din of thousands of Swiss practicing their marksmanship. At the same time, Northrop F-5E Tiger fighter jets skim along mountain faces and blue-gray-uniformed figures clamber down couloirs and across alpine meadows. With a militia of 625,000 men, Switzerland, as the well-worn saying goes, does not have an army, it is an army...
...Seoul, a disciplined East German contingent is ready to demonstrate its prowess again, with strong competitors in everything from swimming to marksmanship. Many analysts expect the country's 307 athletes to take home more metal than the 645 Americans, and maybe even more than the 520 competitors from the Soviet Union...
Sitting in their stone-walled shelters, the guerrillas joke with insouciance while sipping tea and munching on bread and grapes. When an enemy shell goes spectacularly awry, they exchange gibes about the enemy's marksmanship. Near misses evoke nods and grins of appreciation...
...East European cast. The Freischutz production further suffered from Joachim Herz's relentlessly proletarian staging. The first great German romantic opera and a major influence on Wagner, Freischutz is the story of a forester, Max, who almost falls into the devil's clutches trying to regain his lost marksmanship and win the hand of his beloved Agathe. In Herz's hands, though, Weber's tuneful, folkish fable became an undisguised metaphor of the new social order in the farmers' and workers' state. He illustrated the class struggle, for example, by having the villagers manhandle Prince Ottokar at the opera...
They may be the last real madmen as well. Lyle Nelson, 34, devotes himself to exasperating events that combine grueling cross-country races with marksmanship. Biathletes ski a demanding course, periodically halting to fire a .22-cal. rifle from 50 meters at small metal discs. Trying to steady on a target with a heart beating 200 times a minute from skiing is, says former U.S. Coach Art Stegen, "like a high jumper running a 5,000-meter race as an approach...