Word: seoul
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...Until last week, she was known as something of a hard-luck case. The jumper broke her ankle, for example, the day after she made the 1980 Olympic team. She also had a reputation for choking at big meets, placing only eighth in Los Angeles. But in Seoul it was Kostadinova who choked. Asked if she was happy with her effort, the Bulgarian snapped, "I am not satisfied. I can set the world record." Maybe next time...
...ugliest story of the 22nd Olympics began in a bathroom in the basement of Seoul's track-and-field stadium. There, on Sept. 24, a smallish man with a fabulously muscled body and rage-filled eyes had to perform the indignity of champions. A master of explosive, almost inexplicable starts, he had already propelled his body down the 100-meter track faster than anyone before. Now his legs had ceased churning, he had relinquished the flag of his adopted Canada, which he had waved around the stadium, and the applause for the seemingly guileless sprinter who had dethroned...
After Canadian officials were notified that he had tested positive for the anabolic steroid stanozolol, a substance that is supposed to help build lean muscle mass, they hustled the Jamaican-born sprinter out of Olympic Village, the cockpit of his glory, and checked him into a Seoul hotel under an ignominious pseudonym. There, at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Carol Anne Letheren, chef de mission of the Canadian delegation, stripped Johnson of the medal he had already given to his mother. "He was in a state of shock," said Letheren. "He still did not comprehend the situation." A few hours...
...sports competitions. In the 1983 Pan American Games, 19 athletes were disqualified and an additional dozen from just the U.S. track-and-field squad scuttled home before their events. In the 1984 Olympics eleven athletes, two of them medalists, were ejected from the Games for drug abuses. Before the Seoul Games began, several Americans, including '84 cycling gold medalist Steve Hegg and national swimming champion Angel Myers, were bounced for banned substances. But no disqualification has ever rocked the sporting world the way the Ben Johnson scandal...
Around the world, Johnson's disqualification suddenly riveted public attention on the decades-old problem of performance-enhancing drug use with an altogether new intensity. By week's end the total of ten drug-related disqualifications in Seoul was close to the 1984 figure. But many thought: If this world-record holder would risk detection, everyone must be doing it. Spectators felt deceived and non-using athletes felt gypped. Overnight the Olympics became clouded, suspected of being an unholy chemistry competition rather than the glorious alchemy of will, talent and training that is its ideal...