Word: swimmer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...there was a different feeling for me. I was watching Nesty, a swimmer from Suriname, a country in South America, win the Gold medal in the Olympics in an event in which Blacks are not supposed to compete...
...surface in five meters or so and begin stroking. Except Berkoff. He stays 5 ft. underwater, on his back, wriggling along with a legs-together dolphin kick, like that used by butterflyers. This is astonishing not to see. Most of the lanes are filled with thrashing swimmers, and Berkoff's is placid. At 35 meters (or 32 kicks, as he counts underwater), Berkoff pops up, half a body length ahead of everyone else. Not, he says, desperate for air, but "quite comfortable." Apparently so. He beat Soviet Igor Poliansky's 100- meter world record by five one-hundredths...
...Expect the Chinese, East German and Japanese men to be chasing the Soviet gymnasts for team gold, Swimmer Tamas Darnyi of Hungary to be chasing his own world record in the 400-m ind. medley, and Biondi to be continuing his medal chase, in the 100-m butterfly. On the basketball court the U.S. takes on the 1987 Pan Am winner, Brazil, and its colorful colossus, Oscar Schmidt. In the water Terry Schroeder captains the U.S. against defending world and Olympics champ, Yugoslavia...
...third-graders, who are measured, weighed, timed and questioned. The resulting data is churned through a computer at the German College of Physical Culture in Leipzig, which determines whether a child might have a special aptitude for a certain sport. Says Renate Vogel, a former world champion G.D.R. swimmer and now deputy coach of the West German women's Olympic team: "No one with talent falls through the sieve...
...athlete, the G.D.R. is still paradise," East German Swimmer and Defector Jens-Peter Berndt, now a member of the West German Olympic team, told the Bonn daily Die Welt. "Nowhere else do athletes work so intensely and with such concentration. All your problems are taken off your hands." Exhibition meets, medical bills, sponsorship, job worries, troublesome journalists -- all such distractions are largely unknown to them. But there are other pressures. Academic performance and political education are closely monitored. A "socialist family tree" -- no close relatives in the West -- is required for international competition...