Word: medalling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...skate to Rimsky-Korsakov's lush symphonic suite Schéhérazade. Under the tutelage of Bobby Thompson, a British coach close to Torvill and Dean, the pair had revamped their style over the past two years. In 1983 the effort paid off with a bronze medal at the World Championships. They had come to Sarajevo with real hopes for a silver, but finished in fourth place after being marked down .3 of a point below the panel's average by Italian Judge Cia Bordogna. Later she insisted that the couple's selection of classical music...
...silver. Two days later their coach, Ron Ludington, the last American pairs medalist (bronze in 1960), summed up the free skating: "I'd call that walking right through the door, wouldn't you?" Wouldn't anybody? On the big night Valova and Vasiliev held their gold-medal lead on a more difficult program. Nurtured, like the Protopopovs, in the Leningrad school, they showed its hallmarks: coolly cerebral slow passages alternating with flashy jumps and lifts. But the performance of the young Soviet pair, Larisa Selezneva and Oleg Makarov, with whom the Carrutherses were tied, was the crucial...
...here was a skater of both athletic power and aesthetic sensibility. She has a natural fizz that makes the efforts of most others look labored. In fact her coach, Jutta Muller, is a stern drillmaster who is accustomed to Olympic triumph: her daughter Gabriele Seyfert took the silver medal in 1968, and Anett Poetzsch, another pupil, was the Lake Placid gold medalist...
Among the Americans, Elaine Zayak, 18, dropped quickly out of contention with a weak showing in the school figures. Though she had no hope of a medal, Zayak refused to hang her head. She turned in a charming short program that scored higher on technical difficulty than did Sumners', and in the free skating, she put on perhaps the best performance of her life, cleanly landing four triples, including one in a combination with two other jumps. Her farewell was an emotionally satisfying slam dunk in her critics' faces, and earned admiration for her tenacious spirit...
Nothing was wrong with his theatrical instincts, however. After the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner at the medal ceremony, Hamilton grabbed an American flag and skated an exhilarating victory lap around the arena with it. When it was all over, Hamilton reflected, "The whole last four years have been for this night. I've worked so hard, trained so hard, waited so long. I wanted it to be special. I wanted my greatest program. It wasn't my best, but I did it. I came here to win the gold medal. Maybe it wasn't pretty...