Word: swimmer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...might look at it as long as he can look at anything." Got that right, Tony. And on this splendid natural stage the Olympic Games' newest sport, triathlon, debuted on Saturday morning, a splashy beginning to a day of competition that had Australia ecstatic by nightfall. In the evening, swimmer Ian Thorpe, a mere legend at 17 going into the Games, officially became immortal. His performance in anchoring Australia's 4 x 100 freestyle relay team to the gold medal over the cocky Americans became instant history here, a place that, these days, cares about history...
...Lenny Krayzelburg, child of the Soviet Union. Why was his piece of this grand picture missing? If there was something for everyone, why was there nothing for him? He would be better off back in Odessa, back in Ukraine. "I knew what it took to be a world-class swimmer, because I'd been in a program to develop world-class swimmers," he says now, 24 years old, the world-record holder in both the 100- and 200-meter backstrokes. "I knew I wasn't getting that here. No matter what I did on my own, I knew I didn...
Krayzelburg enrolled at Santa Monica City College and played water polo. He soon became Blumkin's best swimmer. But Blumkin knew Krayzelburg would be better off in a big-time environment. UCLA would have been the first choice, but the Bruins had recently dropped men's swimming. The University of Southern California was an easy second choice. Blumkin contacted Trojans coach Mark Schubert. "In all the time I've been coaching, this might have been the most unselfish act I've ever seen," Schubert says. "Lenny had another year of eligibility at Santa Monica, but Stu was looking for what...
...world championships, in Perth. Last year in Sydney he broke world records in the 100 and 200. At the U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis this month, he won both the 100 and 200 backstroke. Without having swum an Olympic race, Krayzelburg has become the U.S.'s most recognizable male swimmer, signed to a six-figure Speedo endorsement contract. "Two years ago I went back to Odessa with my parents and my sister," Lenny says. "I went to the pool ... the place where I started to swim. It was very sad. The building was vacant. The pool was now a dump...
...more recent example: in 1996 the whole world east of Dublin and west of the Shannon doubted that Irish swimmer Michelle Smith was clean, as a hulking version of her prior self had lowered her times astonishingly. Her success coincided with her marriage to a former discus thrower from the Netherlands who had been kicked out of his own sport as a drug cheat. But Smith won four medals in Atlanta, three of them gold, while passing all her exams. She then dodged random testing for two years before being confronted one dawn at her County Kilkenny home. She reluctantly...