Word: olympian
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Usually, when you witness a bit of sports history, euphoria sweeps through the building. But when short-track speedskater Apolo Ohno finished third in the 1,000 meter event on Saturday night, giving him seven career Olympic medals, the most-ever by an American Winter Olympian, you couldn't help feel a little bit like ... "ack." Maybe it was the third-place finish. America tends to like its triumphs golden. But the truth is, while Team USA is now trumpeting Ohno as the "most-decorated" American Winter Olympian of all time, the label is a bit contrived...
Last Thursday afternoon, during the ceremonial raising of the national flags at the Vancouver Olympic village, the Mexican national anthem blared over the loudspeaker. Mexico's lone Winter Olympian, alpine skier Hubertus von Hohenlohe, stood at attention, right arm crossing his chest. That's right - Hubertus von Hohenlohe. If you're thinking that name doesn't sound very Mexican, you'd be absolutely correct. In fact, he's a descendant of German royalty, the son of Prince Alfonso Hohenlohe and Princess Ira Fürstenberg. Can't get more Mexican than that...
...about the safety of the Whistler track, which is the fastest in the world; last February, a German athlete was clocked traveling more than 95 m.p.h. during a luge World Cup test event. Over the past week, about a dozen athletes have crashed during luge training here. A Romanian Olympian was briefly knocked unconscious, and the gold medal favorite, Armin Zoeggeler of Italy, survived a crash unhurt, just before Kumaritashvili...
...China Books vary greatly in quality, but even the best leave me cold due to their bird's-eye view of the P.R.C. Adopting an Olympian perspective, their authors tend to use broad strokes to portray things that actually require a fine-grained touch. For example, most treat China's population as an undifferentiated mass, or one that can be bisected along just one axis: be it the 90% Han and 10% non-Han ethnic divide, the clear ideological fault line between loyalists and dissidents, and so on. And they often buy into the cozy but distorting official myth...
...time Olympian welcomes the fifth member of his family, it seems unlikely that he will brood over the Harvard Multi Meet for very long...