Word: sloping
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week Diann Roffe-Steinrotter could identify with that. Clad in skintight purple spandex at the starting gate of the Olympic course, the diminutive (5 ft. 4 in.) racer from Potsdam, New York, gazed down the ice- glazed slope to the distant valley below. In the Arctic chill, a kaleidoscopic blur of 40,000 snowsuits gazed back through a vast video screen. "I was sick-to-my-stomach nervous," she said. "I tried to drink water. My insides felt like California during the earthquake." But somehow as she zipped past red barns and sailed over moose and lynx paths down...
...routine downhill race in the final season of a career that had already brought two world championships, broke her neck last month and died. Conditions were unquestionably risky. The timer pole that she hit was controversially sited. And Maier, a consummate pro, knew the dangers. But the slope was familiar, and 67 other competitors that day survived uneventfully. Her death emphasized for athletes and audiences alike the inherent risk in the Olympic goal of pushing "faster, higher, stronger" to the limit. It also underscored a hard lesson every competitor learns in death's little precursor, defeat: Luck is more than...
...worthy of sport." The same day, in a rehearsal of an attempt to outdo the melodrama of 1992 in Barcelona -- when an archer ignited the Olympic flame with a streaking arrow -- Norwegian ski jumper Ole Gunnar Fidjestol sought to soar down the slope and vault into the air as one of the final bearers of the Olympic flame on its journey to Lillehammer. But he crashed askew, incurring a concussion and dropping out of his place of honor. The privilege went to Stein Gruben, who brought the stunt off stirringly...
...years of taking it easy on the ice-show circuit? Is Bonnie Blair still the fastest woman on earth, or at least the fastest three inches above it? Does anything remain of Alberto Tomba but the boasting? These are sporting questions to be resolved on the rink or slope, not in a courtroom or hospital operating theater. And as always, there will be surprises, fresh faces emerging, familiar ones sagging, obscurities having everything go right on one perfectly timed day. Once those stories start, these Olympics will seem less doomstruck...
...minute we start drawing lines censoring some speech [perceived as sexual harasment], we'll be on a slippery slope downhill," Silverglate said...