Word: swimmer
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...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...
...Thorpe the most technically proficient swimmer of all time? Probably not. Is he the most physically powerful freestyler there has ever been? No again. Surprisingly, he is unimpressive in the gym and hopeless at ball sports. But at 6 ft. 4 in. and 200 lbs., with natural buoyancy and a basketballer's feet and hands, he can move water like the moon. His cartoon elasticity, combined with the longest stroke in swimming, makes "Thorpedo" everything his nickname suggests: sleek, smooth, strangely beautiful and, to the competition, lethal. "If you were going to do a Frankenstein," says Brian Sutton, coach...
Thorpe too will begin a new life in his 20s, but unlike Billy Madison, he'll do so from a position of strength--probably, almost certainly, as an Olympic great: Thorpedo, the most complete swimmer of all time...
...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...
...athletes, of course, the stumbling block is equal enforcement: There is no reason for one swimmer, for example, to give up her human growth hormone (an increasingly popular supplement for which there currently are no tests) unless she has a guarantee that everyone she's competing against will also be clean. And at this point athletes have no such confidence. If, however, every single athlete is bound by the rules of some legitimate authority figure - i.e., other than the IOC-run World Anti-Doping Agency, currently the reigning arbiter of drug policy - there might be some impetus for clean competition...