Word: medalist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...dragged away by police. But aside from a few minor deterrences - including a few raw eggs tossed from the crowd - the torch bearers' passage was without incident. The flame arrived at its final destination, the outdoor stage of the Nagano cultural building, in the hands of Japan's gold-medalist marathoner Mizuki Noguchi. Japan emerged from its Olympic relay with its honor intact and its relations with China unscathed...
...drawn from China's paramilitary People's Armed Police, which is used for internal security. The group formed last August and trained by running six miles daily. While their chief mission is to protect the flame, they've also cracked down on protesters. Sebastian Coe, a two-time medalist and chairman of the London Games in 2012, called them "thugs" and said they tried to push him. A torchbearer in Paris, environmental journalist Yolaine De La Bigne, told the Associated Press that the team snatched away the Tibetan flag headband she was wearing...
Shannon Miller, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the most decorated U.S. gymnast in history, remembers other changes to the vault as well, including a larger, padded safety zone around the take-off point. "I remember it was a big thing in the gymnastics world," she says, when the International Gymnastics Federation's new rules required the springboard to be surrounded by a horseshoe-shaped mat. "You wouldn't get credit for the vault if you didn't have a safety mat," says Miller. "Before that, it was just the springboard, and if you launched crooked, then you were...
...Unfortunately, it looks as though events are about to repeat themselves. As Pierre de Coubertin, creator of the modern Olympics, noted, “Holding an Olympic Games means evoking history.” Will President Hu Jintao refuse to congratulate a gold medalist who happens to be Taiwanese? Will China’s own “undesirables” be conveniently moved out of the television cameras’ sight...
POOLMAN Laszlo Kiss was very disappointed when he failed to win a medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics. The 19-year-old Hungarian swimmer came up empty in the 200-m backstroke, but he got an unexpected consolation prize when U.S. gold medalist Mike Troy shared some of his training secrets with him. "I immediately saw the difference between the way Mike prepared and the way we did," says Kiss, now 67. "They trained more and harder, and the dry [land] training was very focused." For Kiss--and eventually for the world of swimming--that insight changed everything...