Word: olympian
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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...
...chance to make amends for 1984, when he only won four gold medals. In the long-limbed company of swimmers, the little tadpole Janet Evans seems to represent all the early mornings and late suppers of all the tiny racers in all the neighborhood pools. The great Olympian John Naber laughed wonderfully when someone suggested that age-group swimming is just another kind of phenobarbital prescribed by parents to drain their children of excess energy and make sure they go to Yale. But on their own, a few of the old salts, like the '84 hero Rowdy Gaines, continue...
...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...