Word: gymnasts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...half a month's wage for the average urban worker) to have their eyes enlarged, their eyelids folded or their noses straightened. Men think nothing of putting down $5 for a permanent wave. Others spend $5 for disco-coordinated aerobics classes with Oriental Jane Fondas like former Star Gymnast Qi Yufang...
While spinning out the story of the Games, McKay avoids the cliches with which so much of television sports is infested, concentrating on small events in time, not the record-setting times in events. His own favorite moments tend to center on individuals like the Japanese gymnast at Mexico City in 1968 who competed with a broken kneecap. "Television has made it possible for the audience to identify with individual athletes," he explains. Every four years, McKay searches for something rarely seen nowadays, something that, ironically, has been lost in part through the very medium in which he works...
John Bachar, 26, is a Yosemite climber who has pushed strength and skill to a level that astonishes even other good rock apes. Equipped with nothing but boots and gymnast's chalk, and unbelayed by safety ropes, Bachar flows up pitches graded 5.8 or better. Gym workouts have given him steely arm and finger strength, but superb technique and unshakable concentration are his most powerful adhesives. He may work out a sequence of ten or so moves to take him up an overhang hundreds of feet in the air, then discover that the route cannot be forced any farther...
There is scarcely a discernible connection between the improvisers' tales. Usually after a bout of vicious lovemaking, each bard tells a snippet of a story. A Russian seduces a teen-age Polish gymnast on an ocean liner; an Armenian American on a pilgrimage to Soviet Armenia makes furious love with her guide. The lengthiest improvisation is narrated by the poet Surkov, who fancies he is Pushkin incarnate. After a jealous scene with Pushkin's wife, he retells the master's unfinished tale, Egyptian Nights, followed by a parodic string of bromides: "Her black eyes flashed...
...equipment is better," says Warmerdam, "but so are the athletes. It's a combination." Just as the pole vaulter himself is a combination: sprinter, weight lifter, gymnast. He is characteristically happy. "Because," says Warmerdam brightly, "it is just a fun thing...