Word: medal
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...despite our relentless obsession with victory, despite the well-funded gold-medal strategies of sporting giants like the U.S. and China, despite the lure of multimillion-dollar advertising contracts for the most winsome of gold medalists, the Games were as much about those who finished dead last in their events as about those who took home gold. How else to explain the giddy joy of Katura Marae, proud citizen of the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu? The 14-year-old came in last in her heat of the 100-m dash, yet still clocked her fastest time...
...Sporting superpowers China, Australia and France each had at least five athletes finish in the lowest spot. And Greece, which ended the Games with the smallest medal tally of any host country since Canada won only 11 medals at the 1976 Montr?al Olympics, appeared at the bottom of the list at least eight times. One of the most poignant final-place finishes, though, came from Brunei's Jimmy Anak Ahar, the Southeast Asian nation's sole Olympic athlete, who straggled far behind the pack in the 1,500 m, erasing his country's dreams of Olympic respectability. Still sucking wind...
...seen Vesuvius blow its top and knows that in a few moments an empire will be covered in dust. Brown's mood didn't improve after Saturday's 4-point loss to Lithuania, although, thanks to a Greek victory over Angola, his team backed into the medal round. But 12 years after the original Dream Team pulled off the improbable trick of charming its opponents while destroying them by an average of 43.8 points, Brown's U.S. squad is a long shot for gold and has become, unfairly, a fashionable symbol of American hubris. "For the record," says guard Dwayne...
...resting place for numerous chunks of American pride. Venus Williams and Andy Roddick got bounced in tennis, the gymnasts weren't nearly as sparkling as the glitter in their hair, and Michael Phelps looked merely human. Before long, though, the U.S. was sitting in its customary place atop the medal standings, with golds in everything from double trap shooting to road cycling to gymnastics; the swim team alone took 28 medals. While flip turns and double Arabians are cute in a quadrennial sort of way, they do not display the full range of what Americans consider athleticism, nor do they...
...they also believe in quaint traditions like, say, practice. "That's the big thing," says Brown. "Puerto Rico has been practicing for three months, twice a day. Other teams have played together for years. You just can't come together for a few weeks and fight for a gold medal anymore. Everybody else is too good...