Word: sport
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Mario Martinez. He already has an Olympic medal -- the silver for super heavyweight lifting in 1984; he captured three gold medals at the 1987 Pan Am Games and placed tenth in the 1987 world championships. But Martinez gets no state subsidy, no help from a national council for his sport to pay for his San Francisco apartment. With a wife and one-year-old daughter to support -- not to mention a special diet to maintain his 318 lbs. of muscle -- Martinez, 31, cannot exercise six or seven hours a day like his Soviet rivals...
...other athletes, in U.S. Olympic Committee dorms in Colorado Springs, where he cannot cook or bring liquor into the room, and his bathroom and phone are down the hall. He must meet an 11 p.m. curfew and take a mandatory 90-min. nap at noon. Although the sport is big enough in Europe that club players can earn in excess of $50,000 a year, Story survives on $4,000 from donations and a part- time job with the U.S.O.C. ticket office, plus free room and board...
Story is far from alone. Robert Nieman, 40, is a former world champion in pentathlon, the sport that combines running, swimming, shooting, fencing and horseback riding. Jobless while training, he relies on "the fact that my wife has a very good job." Adds Nieman: "McDonald's gave us some free hamburgers. That's big time in pentathlon...
Fate works in quirky ways. Five years ago, Soviet Dmitri Bilozerchev, just 16, won the all-around title at the world gymnastics championships in Budapest with an astounding 59.85 points out of 60. The youngest male champion in the history of the sport, he performed routines of exquisite difficulty with a mature, polished technique, though his prime was still years away. "At music schools, they say of such children that they have the absolute sense of pitch," says his coach, Aleksandr Aleksandrov. "With Dmitri, he has the absolute sense of the art of gymnastics...
Many consider Bilozerchev beatable, especially at the hands of his teammates. Yet the burden he carries will be greater than theirs. Says Coach Aleksandrov: "It was Dima's charge to raise the sport to the next level. If he is remembered for only medals, it will be a failure...