Word: swimming
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...roaring start. Certainly Michellie Jones, the world's top-ranked woman triathlete, was tipped to win this event. And a few of her countrymen, somewhere around 150,000 of them, turned out to cheer her on over the suitable-for-framing course that started with a swim in Sydney Harbor. She looked to be in good shape there - Australian athletes perform best when wet. Plying waters ringed by shark-repelling sonar devices, Jones avoided becoming fish breakfast, then took the lead in the bike race. But she could not repel Switzerland's Brigitte McMahon in the run. The Swiss held...
...answer was the Westside Jewish Community Center. It had an old 25-yard pool, far from Olympic standards, but it was close to where the Krayzelburgs were living. It had a swim team, though not a serious training program. Lenny could practice on his own, compete with the team. There was no swim team at his high school, Fairfax, a basketball factory that had sent Chris Mills and Sean Higgins toward NBA careers, so the Westside JCC became Lenny's sole base for swimming. He even wound up with a lifeguard job there, so he was at the center...
...this kid shows up one day and says he'd like to work out with our team," says Stu Blumkin, who was the swim coach at Santa Monica City College in 1993. "I was skeptical. There aren't many kids who just show up who can swim fast." The child of the Soviet Union was now 17. He could speak English. He had a car. The family had moved out of West Hollywood to Studio City. He had sent out letters to four-year colleges, looking for a scholarship, but without a boxful of blue ribbons and medals, he didn...
Schubert, too, was skeptical at the beginning. Potential world champions don't just show up. Of all sports, swimming is the most measured, timed, predictable. There aren't supposed be surprises. Yet here was a big surprise. Schubert, too, became a fast convert. He offered a scholarship. "This was a totally different level of competition for me," Krayzelburg says. "When I showed up, I was the fifth-fastest backstroker on the team. I wasn't eligible for my first year, so I only could swim in the little, 25-meter pool every day, while the team practiced...
...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. It was filled with garbage...