Word: medal
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...curling medal is Britain's first Winter Olympic gold since 1984, when Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won at ice dancing, which, of course, also elicits cruel and condescending comments - and is enormously popular...
Forget that hockey match the U.S. won 22 years ago in Lake Placid. The real miracle on ice happened last week, when Australian Steven Bradbury, 28, won his country's first-ever Winter Olympic gold medal. With only one lap to go in the men's short track speed skating 1,000-m final, Bradbury, who'd never had a world-class solo victory, was trailing far behind the other four skaters. Then the pack crashed and Bradbury cruised past the carnage from worst to first. "I was like, 'Hang on a minute, I think I just won,'" Bradbury told...
Early on Tuesday morning, just hours after the gold medal had gone to the Russians, Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze, the nine judges of the pairs event and two referees convened in a windowless basement room of the Salt Lake Ice Center. The door was sealed with thick tape that kept prying reporters from eavesdropping on the deliberations. It also prevented them from hearing the weeping of the French judge, Marie-Reine Le Gougne. Ron Pfenning is the U.S. referee who would bring Le Gougne's accusations to Ottavio Cinquanta, president of the International Skating Union. Last week he told...
Until last week, only real fans of the sport knew the extent to which skate judging can involve intrigue, deceit and shady arithmetic. For them it was just mildly surprising that a flawless performance by the Canadians could get a silver medal while the gold went to a bumpier routine by the Russians. What was truly surprising was that the matter exploded. For that, credit is due to Jacques Rogge, the new president of the International Olympic Committee. It was Rogge who pressed on Cinquanta the idea to award a second set of gold medals to Sale and Pelletier...
...their camp. Sale and Pelletier looked briefly stunned. The crowd of some 16,000 at the Salt Lake Ice Center exploded in boos. The possibility of a judge's deal was in the air immediately. The Russians were eager to sustain a long tradition of winning the gold medal for pairs skating--10 Olympic Games in a row. The French wanted just as badly to win gold in the ice dance, in which Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat, the World silver medalists in that discipline, represented France's only real shot at a first place in skating...