Word: olga
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Soviet mythology about U.S. athletes begins with genetic theories worthy of Jimmy the Greek. Says Point Guard Olga Burakin of the Soviet women's basketball team: "American teams are so competitive because they have blacks, who are inherently more capable, whereas whites are not nearly so skillful." Then it centers on wealth: the presumed abundance of facilities at thousands of high schools and colleges...
...Olga. Nadia. Mary Lou. Their first names alone are the way we remember them, the last names seemingly too tedious and weighty for ones so petite. Olga Korbut was the scrawny, pig-tailed brunet at the 1972 Munich Games who, with her double-jointed contortions and infectious grin, convinced us that human hearts beat within the bodies of robotic Soviet athletes. Four years later at the Montreal Games, it was a long-limbed brooding Rumanian, Nadia Comaneci, who stole hearts by posting the first perfect 10s ever in Olympic gymnastics competition. Then in Los Angeles in 1984, American Mary...
...turns 15 this week, is the prankster, tripping her teammates when the coaches are looking the other way. Svetlana Boginskaya, 15, - the tallest on the team (a towering 5 ft. 2 in.), is the most serious, often perched on a mat between exercises with her nose in a book. Olga Strazheva, 15, has an appetite for science fiction. Svetlana Baitova, 16, totes Jack, a stuffed puppy, wherever she goes. When it comes to talk of Seoul, all playfulness falls away. For these girls it will be a grudge match against the Rumanians. "We won't give anything away," Boginskaya vows...
...Seoul a hold-your-breath affair. With each Olympics, the sport ascends to a new plateau of audacity that would have been unthinkable four years earlier. And four years from now, even those moves may seem out of the dark ages. So too will the sweethearts of Seoul. When Olga Korbut tried to repeat her Munich triumphs in 1976, she was upstaged by Newcomer Nadia Comaneci. When Nadia tried to re-create her glory in 1980, audiences hardly recognized the once sylphlike pixie. Mary Lou Retton perhaps proved the wisest; she fired her single shot at glory, then retired...
...gift of making her audience happy. Part of her secret may be that glorious smile. She has superb technique based on first-rate ballet training, but she makes even a triple throw look spontaneous. She has the innocence and sheer energy that enable her, like earlier East bloc sweethearts Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, to slay hearts on both sides of the Great Power divide...