Word: medal
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...Italy - all this freestyle and half-pipe stuff is strictly New World. A course, a clock and a mountain are challenge enough. The Austrians have owned Alpine skiing lately, but the men's team has been devastated by injuries, most significantly to Hermann (the Herminator) Maier, a double gold- medal winner at Nagano who shattered his leg in a motorcycle accident last summer. Five other top Austrians are also on the shelf. Yet Austria is so deep it can easily claim gold through Stephan Eberharter, currently the No. 1 ranked skier on tour...
DIED. JACK SHEA, 91, gold-medal-winning Olympic speed skater; of injuries from a car accident; in Saranac Lake, N.Y. Shea, who won two gold medals in 1932 but refused to skate in the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany, became the patriarch of the nation's first family of three generations of Olympians. His son competed in three skiing events in 1964, and a month ago, his grandson earned a spot on the U.S. Olympic skeleton team, in which sledders go headfirst down...
Forget the storybook drama about the child prodigy who laces up her first skates at the age of two and glides hour after hour in lonely ice rinks so she can someday bring home a gold medal. That's yesterday's Olympic profile. It's certainly not Yoko Miyake's story. She's a snowboarder, and this band of offbeat rebels doesn't play by the old rules. Many of the sport's stars didn't even want to join the rarefied Olympian world, when the suits who run the quadrennial ice-fest invited them in four years...
...Though she may be laid back, her fellow countrymen are not. Japan desperately craves Olympic champions. The state of its winter team is so shaky that the slacker sport of snowboarding offers the country one of its best shots at a medal in Salt Lake City. It's quite a comedown from four years ago, in Nagano, where the host team ski jumped and skated its way to five gold medals. This time, it's up to Miyake and Michiyo Hashimoto, 29, who recently finished first and second in a World Cup event. Hashimoto, an Osaka native, is also...
...then zipping down the slope again and up the other side, going back and forth, like a human pendulum. It looks like skateboarding in snow. Both profess, in the mantra of their sport, that having fun is more important than winning. Insists Miyake: "I don't know why the medal question keeps coming up all the time." If she wins, it will be one for the slackers, zero for the salarymen...