Word: medalling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...final round of the team competition at a disadvantage. One of their team members, Martina Jentsch, had been forced by injury to withdraw, leaving the East Germans with just five gymnasts and without the opportunity to drop the lowest of six scores. Still, for the East Germans, the bronze medal will always be tarnished. And, ironically, while the U.S. team would have been quickly forgotten had it won the bronze, the furor ensures that the 1988 U.S. gymnastics team, led by Brandy Johnson and Mills, will enter the annals of footnote memories...
Such are the Amateur's Games. The issue of amateurism shadows every discussion at the current Olympics, and not just because Korean President Roh Tae Woo has dubbed this the "Era of the Ordinary Man." All the divisions - have grown increasingly blurred, moreover, as governments offer medal winners homes and lifetime incomes. Even the terms are slippery now: the word amateur has actually been excised from the official Olympic lexicon, while professionalism remains a dirty word among those who want flawless efficiency in their plans but not their hearts...
...dizziness, thought it heard the Suriname anthem playing on the Olympic Victrola. For just a second there, a 4-ft. 11-in. Turk seemed to be lifting a 420-lb. dumbbell, the equivalent of two Olympic committeemen. A buoyant black swimmer with ordinary thighs was receiving the gold medal. South Korea was rioting in a boxing ring. The phones were working. The laundry was ready. And in the race for regal figure, Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis both came running...
...tumble with the other dolls at the trick knee of the Rumanian defector Bela Karolyi. When she missed making the Olympic team by 0.1 point, he brought her along as a roustabout. Docked 0.5 points for Faehn's harmless presence on the platform, the U.S. women lost the bronze medal to the G.D.R. by 0.3 points. In his understated way, Karolyi expressed how they felt: "Like we were stopped on the highway, robbed, kicked in the butt and sent home naked...
...Games' sweetest mob scenes occurred when South Korea won its first gold. Incongruous shouts went up at every venue. The press-row televisions were all dialed to Greco-Roman wrestling. At a minor league scoreboard in the press center, where a medal count is kept by hand, a bustle of Koreans hurried over just to watch the tiny gold disk go up for Kim Young-Nam. They sighed...