Word: olympian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...roller skate wedged beneath his forward foot simulates the bobbing boat. Old mirrors of every shape, rescued from dressers and garage sales, are suspended all around. In each of them, he checks his technique against the home movies he has taken of the Rumanians and Swedes. This is the Olympian getting ready...
...Olympian is distinguished from the garden-variety athlete, at least in the U.S., by a fairly uniform obscurity. Except for two weeks every four years, the Olympian is roundly ignored. Thanks to lavish surpluses from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, amateur facilities and finances have improved. But even in the glamorous -- meaning profitable, marketable -- pursuits like track and field, serious money touches just a few. Maybe only the top performer in only a third of the events is truly thriving. Most Olympians just...
Which is not to say Hayes and Nicklaus never sweated. But if perspiration could be qualified, broken down and quantified, the Olympian probably distills the purest athletic effort by the drop. The most arcane sports, which include many of the Olympic events, are nearly always learned late and hard, in the U.S. after playing baseball and football for a while. Speed does come naturally to the beautiful racehorses of the running track, like Florence Griffith Joyner, though at the world-class level science kicks in and a specialized knowledge is required. Hobbled running backs reach uncertainly for their hamstrings...
...field, he is erudite. "Howard Davis was middle class, wasn't he?" Tyson muses idly, referring to another Olympian on Spinks' team. "Davis was a real good boxer. You can come from a middle-class background and be a real good boxer. But you have to know struggle to be the champ." Without socks, robe or orchestra, wearing headgear as spare as a World War I aviator's, Tyson hurries out to demonstrate his point against an unsteady corps of clay pigeons with perfect names like Michael ("the Bounty") Hunter and Rufus ("Hurricane") Hadley. The slippery leather thuds reverberate through...
...Greek deities, the impersonal beings who presided over the creation of the world and its gods: the earth spirit Gaia, daughter of Chaos and mother of the Titans; Ouranos, god of the skies; their son Okeanos and his wife Tethys, parents of the sea and river gods. Unlike their Olympian descendants, these were too archaic to have acquired a fixed form in classical art. There was no thousand-year lineage of marble prototypes for their shape. They could be big and indistinct. And the conjunction of monumental size with muffled form entranced Tucker. The resulting pieces look ineloquent, truncated, more...