Word: skater
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...President Carter phoned Coach Herb Brooks to say: "We were trying to do business, and nobody could. We were watching TV with one eye and Iran and the economy with the other." But even the thrilling hockey victory could not overshadow the accomplishments of a young and unassuming speed skater from the Midwest. Perhaps the most vivid single image of the 1980 Winter Games was the sight of Eric Heiden's heroically muscled thighs molded in a skating skin of gold as he stroked his way to five Olympic golds, five Olympic records and one world record. Nothing...
...Heiden is certainly one of the best-conditioned athletes in the world. Sometimes he bicycles 100 miles a day to build endurance, bending low over the handlebars and drilling his body to keep that horrific skater's crouch. He lifts weights, he duck-walks for miles, he rollerskates, he spends hours each week sliding back and forth in stocking feet across a 10-ft. formica-covered slideboard, an exercise that mimics the speed skater's side-to-side stroking of the ice. After eight years of such routines, Heiden's thighs are oak thick in circumference...
...They must, in some way, gain their support from it, either as students in Western countries or as "soldiers" in Eastern ones. And when the most successful of these athletes can look forward to special rewards after their playing days are over, like the Kellogg's advertising contract awaiting skater Eric Heiden, then they are pros in all but name. This cannot be a reason to save the Games either...
Compared with the downhill, with its extravagant relationship between gravity and a sort of exhibitionist will, speed skating seems tame to Americans, an exercise grindingly precise, an icy, athletic watchmaking. Only in recent weeks have Eric and Beth Heiden, the brother-and-sister speed skaters from Madison, Wis., begun to educate Americans about the beauties of their sport: the swoopingly powerful grace, the lean, economical rhythms of a skater swinging over very fast, gray-blue ice, bright, silver shavings leaping minutely in the sun with every snick of the skate blade. In Norway and The Netherlands, citadels of the sport...
When Heiden skated onto the ice, the crowd chanted rhythmically, "Eric! E-ric!" Heiden and Kulikov stripped down to their sleek, skintight uniforms. Their hair was tucked into constricting hoods that improve their aerodynamics but, says Heiden, make it hard to breathe in any position other than a skater's crouch...