Word: skater
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Eric Heiden, Olympic speed skater: "People ask me to give speeches. I'm 21 years old. What can I tell anybody...
Even with such conditioning, the speed skater endures considerable pain. Before a 10,000-meter race has ended, Heiden says with feeling, "you think you'd give your life to be able to stand up. Your back is killing you so much you'd do anything to get out of that crouch." Each race has distinctive elements of suffering. The 1,500-meter, for example: "When it's over, you cough up fluid from your lungs for a couple of days afterward. The 1,500-meter hack, we call it. I like the 1,500-meter...
...When the skaters warmed up for the 10,000-meter race that would be Heiden's chance for a fifth gold medal, the arena was jammed with spectators. Along Main Street, fans who had not been able to get tickets climbed homemade ladders in order to peer over the fencing. Heiden stayed in perfect form. "He's not a beauty skater, he's a strength skater," says Leah Poulos Mueller, an American speed skater who won silvers in the women's 500- and 1,000-meter races. Yet in the end Heiden's strength...
Reigning Men's World Champion Vladimir Kovalev of the Soviet Union dropped out of the singles figure-skating competition, supposedly disabled by flu. The best American hope, Charlie Tickner, 26, is normally a stylish and energetic skater, but all week he seemed curiously flat. In the free-skating competition, he suffered some awkward technical problems with a triple jump, but his main difficulty seemed to involve something spiritual: he rarely displayed any of the fire and joy he has given his skating in recent years...
...Carroll, said irritably that "the judges always put Dagmar in there as a buffer between Linda and East Germany's Anett Poetzsch, so that Linda has to come from behind to win." A two-time world and four-time U.S. champion, Fratianne is an excellent but vaguely apprehensive skater; she has only rarely been able to disperse the little cloud of worry that hovers over her performances. She had come to Lake Placid as the favorite, but now she had to beat both Poetzsch and Lurz...