Word: olympian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This year's favorite in the unofficial popularity contest is Isaac Menyoli. The 29-year-old cross-country skier from Buea in snowless Cameroon - his country's first-ever Winter Olympian - wants the ballyhoo that comes with being bad. But unlike the crowd-pleasing losers of Games past, he doesn't want all the attention. He actually has something other than himself to promote: AIDS education...
...Cameroonian proverb says that when a man asks questions, he cannot avoid the answers. When Menyoli asked himself what would happen if he became an Olympian, he knew the answer. "I'm such an amateur skier," he says. "It's tough." But the sport isn't really the point. Menyoli's Olympic-sized ambition is. "I want to ski for a reason," he says. "I want to tell people that they really have to watch out, that AIDS is serious." He'll deserve a medal if he gets that message across...
Eberharter has been a downhill monster, winning four races this season in addition to two super-Gs. The downhill course at Snowbasin already has racers tightening their boots because it's so demanding. "It doesn't favor heavy skiers," says former Olympian Billy Kidd, now director of skiing at Steamboat. "There's no place where you sit in your tuck. It's very technical. You are always on an edge. Eberharter will be tough to beat in downhill and super-G." Austria also has the top-ranked woman in Michaela Dorfmeister, another speed freak. To find Europe's best mogul...
...home a gold medal. That's yesterday's Olympic profile. It's certainly not Yoko Miyake's story. She's a snowboarder, and this band of offbeat rebels doesn't play by the old rules. Many of the sport's stars didn't even want to join the rarefied Olympian world, when the suits who run the quadrennial ice-fest invited them in four years ago, in hopes of injecting some hipness into the staid Winter Games. "I just decided to try this out for awhile," says Miyake. "And now here...
...harrowing training regimens that warp young athletes' sexual development and the widespread use of drugs and supplements meant to induce short bursts of speed and power, a lot of today's would-be medallists might be regarded, in Mormon terms, as defiled and deficient. The bulked-up, souped-up Olympian may break world records, but is he or she fit to enter Mormon heaven, or even serve as a model for classical sculpture? In many cases, no. He's built like a Greek god, goes the old saying, reminding us that the spirit and the physique have long been seen...