Word: mexico
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...point guard, who speaks little Russian, suited up for Russia's basketball team during the Beijing Olympics. African distance runners have competed for Bahrain, and American baseball players for Italy. But the tie between country and competitor is especially loose in the Winter Games, since warm-weather places like Mexico and Jamaica can't even claim a speck of snow or ice. Errol Kerr, the Jamaican ski cross athlete, grew up in the Lake Tahoe area. Ruben Gonzalez, a luger with Argentina's team, lives in Katy, Texas; he moved to the U.S. when he was six. (See 25 Winter...
...relaxing in an Olympic Village coffee shop before the Mexican flag-raising event. "But it's not all that bad." The skier's grandmother is half-Mexican, and von Hohenlohe, who is a Vienna-based singer and photographer when he's not speeding down the slopes, was born in Mexico City while his father was running a Volkswagen plant there. "We always wanted to have one member of the family [who was] Mexican," he says. "So they chose that I was going to be born in Mexico. That was the idea...
...When he was four, however, the prince left Mexico for Spain. He went to schools in Austria, where he took up skiing. Since he was born in Mexico, von Hohenlohe could still compete for that country; he made his Olympic debut in 1984, finishing 38th in the downhill. This will be his fifth Olympics for Mexico, but only the first since 1994. Although he qualified for the Torino Olympics in 2006, the Mexican Olympic Committee refused to send a one-man team. More eager for exposure this year, Mexico decided to support his next-to-nothing shot at a medal...
...Hohenlohe's family has a house in Cabo San Lucas, but he estimates that over the last five years, he has spent just two to three weeks a year in Mexico. Still, he insists he bleeds the green, white and red colors of the Mexican flag. "I feel very Latin in a way, and Spanish," says von Hohenlohe, who does speak fluent Spanish (as well as French, German, Italian and English). "The Spanish were the ones who came to Mexico in the end, so I do feel Mexican. Naturally I have more ties to Spain, but I'm more...
...fact is, von Hohenlohe is a talented skier who has somehow met the Olympic qualifying standards at 51 - and it was infinitely easier for him to do that as an athlete from Mexico where no one skis, than from Austria, where the sport is a national obsession and the competition is cutthroat. Is von Hohenlohe simply a rich heir toying around the Alps, and using a poor country to reach the Olympics? "In life you have a couple of opportunities and openings," the prince argues. "And one of them was that I was born in Mexico. Sure, I used...