Word: medal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...anyone seemed to have a lock on a gold medal this year, it was Soviet pole vaulter Sergei Bubka. He has virtually owned the event for the past four years, breaking the world record nine times and scoring ten of the 16 best jumps in the history of the sport. His real Olympic goal was not to beat the competition -- which seemed a foregone conclusion -- but to become the first man ever to soar over 20 ft., a threshold he had been flirting with all year...
...track-and-field meet that had already stunned the world with a drug scandal, a bumper crop of new records and some surprising upsets, the scene seemed to be set for Bubka to crash through the barrier. First he assured himself of a gold medal and an Olympic record with a jump of 5.9 meters, which translates into 19 ft. 4 1/4 in. Bubka then had the bar set at 20 ft. 1/4 in., took a look, and put away the dream for another year. "It has been a very long season," he explained. "I am very tired...
...mere fact of anabolic steroids and by a rampant suspicion that Johnson's miscalculation was not in usage but in dosage. The Jamaican-born Canadian with fast feet and a slow tongue muscled himself up to a point where he could hoist an entire country onto the gold-medal platform. His 100-meter dash was a sensation. Then, when he let Canada down, it disowned him entirely. Unreserved witnesses stirred by his false accomplishment took precautions never to be so gullible again. From then on, the cheering for the innocent or guilty became just a little careful...
...muscle mass, they hustled the Jamaican-born sprinter out of Olympic Village, the cockpit of his glory, and checked him into a Seoul hotel under an ignominious pseudonym. There, at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Carol Anne Letheren, chef de mission of the Canadian delegation, stripped Johnson of the medal he had already given to his mother. "He was in a state of shock," said Letheren. "He still did not comprehend the situation." A few hours later he was bound for New York, a runner who had stumbled into a future stained with disgrace...
...hard to recall any that has been so passionately denounced. In Canada, a country that was delighting in its first gold medal of the Games, outrage abounded. Canadian Sports Minister Jean Charest announced the draconian penalty of banning Johnson from ever representing Canada on a national team again, calling the incident a "national embarrassment." Many saw the sprinter as pitiable, and some, like I.O.C. vice president Richard Pound, believed he had been duped as well as doped, saying, "Johnson probably wouldn't know what a steroid is." But across Canada spread a sense of bewilderment and anger...