Word: thompson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...airport immigration agent was suspicious when Senior Writer Tom Callahan landed in London to interview Daley Thompson, Britain's two-time Olympic decathlon champion. "Does he know you're coming?" asked the agent, pointing out Thompson's notorious avoidance of the press. "He doesn't give interviews, you know." He did to Callahan, and the result is part of our special section on the Summer Games of the XXIV Olympiad in Seoul...
...Daley Thompson has been the natural heir to Jim Thorpe, she would be the Seoul beneficiary of Babe Didrikson Zaharias. Joyner-Kersee and Thompson, the two-time Olympic decathlon champion, puffing for three, embody all the basic wonders of the Games and encompass almost every grade of emotion. One is just arriving at a place the other has been straining to maintain. She's the blur; he's the mist. They have a "special understanding," as he likes to put it, and a few things...
...have an inordinate amount of faith in my own ability to do things," Thompson says crisply, though his voice and manner have softened since 1984. He is known for a charming braggadocio that runs to self-aggrandizing T shirts. And if asked how he is, he will probably still reply, "A little short of fantastic." But marriage last year to his childhood sweetheart settled Thompson noticeably, and the birth of a daughter twelve weeks prematurely jumbled his regimen. "My little girl weighed less than a bag of sugar. It was incredible how tiny she was. Yet she was perfectly formed...
...have to win just to justify the amount of work I've put in," Thompson says. "I don't think of it as the work since the last success but as the work since the very beginning. To me, it's always been accumulative. But even to lose, I think I'd still do it. No matter how it's gone or how it goes, I wouldn't change anything. It fulfills me to be what...
Thorpe won his Olympic decathlon at Stockholm in 1912. "You, sir," declared King Gustav, "are the world's greatest athlete." To which Thorpe replied with touching simplicity, "Thanks, King." Thompson has often heard the description "world's greatest athlete" -- in fact, he has been called the greatest of all time -- but has never seriously proclaimed the title. "It's merely a tag," he says. He does feel akin to Thorpe though. "We're all his descendants -- Mathias, Rafer Johnson, Jenner, me. We've all shared something. It's passed down from one to the next. It's never anyone...