Word: odessa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...have a coach, didn't have a swimming future. How could this have been? His life since he'd been six had centered around a pool. Oleg, who worked as a coffee-shop manager in the U.S.S.R., had enrolled Lenny in a class at the Army Sports Club in Odessa, just something to do until the boy was a year older, ready for soccer. That was the start. The coaches spotted a talent for the backstroke and nurtured it. When he was put into a special school for swimmers at age nine, he practiced for 51*2 hours every...
...other Russian kids, so we always could talk among ourselves. But at the center no one spoke Russian. I had to learn English. For swimming, though, no matter what I did, I knew I wasn't making enough progress. I knew what those kids were doing in Odessa. I wasn't doing that here." Would he never grow, never develop? That was a real possibility. His gift might have been left behind with the family's other possessions...
...Olympic Trials in Indianapolis this month, he won both the 100 and 200 backstroke. Without having swum an Olympic race, Krayzelburg has become the U.S.'s most recognizable male swimmer, signed to a six-figure Speedo endorsement contract. "Two years ago I went back to Odessa with my parents and my sister," Lenny says. "I went to the pool ... the place where I started to swim. It was very sad. The building was vacant. The pool was now a dump. It was filled with garbage...
...resemble his present family. He says he owes everything to his father and mother. His father is a cook at a hospital. His mother is a technician in the pharmacy at a hospital. "It would still be best for my father and my mother to be back in Odessa," Krayzelburg says. "That is where they would be happier. That's where their friends are. They came here for my sister and me. To give us the opportunity...
...blond. His eyes are blue. He could be featured on one of those Soviet posters of the Cold War, staring ahead toward the end of the latest five-year plan. Yes, he looks Russian. Very Russian. "Oh," he says, "most people are surprised when they hear I'm from Odessa. They think I'm Californian...