Word: placide
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Considering that their sport, or art, is based on stability, skaters' emotions seem as fragile as snowflakes. Many of the participants appear as softly vulnerable as the star-crossed couple of Lake Placid, Randy Gardner and Tai Babilonia. Something at the base of this light and lovely sport is dark and disturbing. At tender ages, children by the pair are instructed how to hold on to each other as intimately as a man and woman, to hang on for dear life and try not to fall. When dropped, they shatter. Olympic athletes in almost all of the various sports heed...
...Olympic hockey team is handsomely endowed by five major sponsors (Miller beer, Sasson clothes, Isuzu Motors, Bristol-Myers and Chock Full O' Nuts coffee) plus gate and television receipts from its 65-game exhibition tour; one televised match with the Soviet All-Stars in Lake Placid provided $500,000 of the $1.3 million budget, about a tenth of which is funded by the U.S. Olympic Committee. The ski team has 23 sponsors (including Oscar de la Renta, Texas Instruments, Subaru) and a $4.5 million budget. The "amateur" skiers can strike rich endorsement deals as long as the money is paid...
...Lake Placid, N.Y., four years ago, Phil took a silver medal in the slalom, just the third Alpine medal collected by an American male in ten Games over 44 years; none has ever won a gold. In 1980 he finished behind the regal Swede Ingemar Stenmark, who also won the giant slalom. Slaloming is weaving through a course described by slender flagpoles. The giant slalom combines all this sideways whooshing with the third Alpine skiing discipline, downhill racing. While Phil also braves the downhill, he has basically followed the concentrated swerves of Stenmark, who has made slalom skiing more than...
...have clinched Phil's first World Cup, their smiles stayed intact. On the last day of the season, Phil prevailed. When one breaks a bone, the other does not say ouch. But Steve says, "It really is like he's a part of me. At the Lake Placid Olympics, I ended up falling, but knowing that he was ahead after the first run made me feel great, almost as if it were...
...dance in it, but we have to be athletes first. They call it an Olympic sport, not an Olympic art, don't they?" The puckish young man is one of the most accomplished skaters in history, but his view runs counter to that of the Establishment. Since Lake Placid the sport's traditionalists have tried to curb daredevil virtuosity in the shows: a new rule will strictly limit the repetition of triple jumps by skaters in Sarajevo. "Skating had got off the track, and we had to get it back on," says one top U.S. skating official. "Skating...