Word: benoit
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...delicate they all really are, and how fragile their dream. For every flying Carl Lewis there is a fallen Mary Decker, and the fullest appreciation of sport requires both. Joan Benoit breezes in gracefully from her marathon, while Gabriela Andersen-Schiess lurches along grotesquely behind, and the picture-memory of the spectators develops into a composite of both images-the terrific and the terrible-much more touching as an entry than either could be individually. The happiest circumstance, of course, is when they take turns. First U.S. Gymnast Mary Lou Retton rejoiced as Rumania's Ecaterina Szabo sighed, then...
...Olympics, where femininity is literally put to the test, the right to trudge 26-plus miles had been withheld from women until this year, when unsinkable Benoit, 27, of Maine and Andersen-Schiess, 39, of Switzerland came to opposite conclusions in the marathon. "I was extremely comfortable the entire way. It was a very smooth, happy, training-run atmosphere," said Benoit, whose 2-hr. 24-min. 52-sec. frolic was dramatic only in light of the arthroscopic knee surgery she underwent 17 days prior to winning...
...Joan Benoit, just being in the marathon constitutes a triumph. Less than three weeks before the May trials, the women's world-record holder from Maine underwent arthroscopic surgery on her complaining right knee, which finally shut down completely in practice. With microscissors, the doctor snipped a tight bundle of inflamed tissue from just behind the joint on the outside of the knee. "You could hear it snap," he said. "It was like cutting a rubber band...
...next day a special exercise cycle was rigged over Benoit's hospital bed, and she began pedaling with her hands to keep her cardiovascular system in fettle. After four days she resumed running, just a mile at first. Next she swam, rode a bike, lifted weights. With a time of 2:31:04, eight minutes slower than her 1983 Boston Marathon record, she won the trial, finishing in tears. Says Bob Sevene, her coach mostly in the sense of someone to lean on: "Joan has this tremendous ability to blank out everything at the start of a race-heat...
...Benoit took to running eleven years ago, at 16, as therapy after a skiing accident. Where most world-class runners gravitate to shinier training sites, Benoit remains partial to Portland, Me., even in the icy winter. "People in Maine respect me for who I am, not for what I've accomplished," she says. "I have no hassles out on the roads. I'm just another Mainer." Norway's Grete Waitz, 30, whom Benoit has never beaten, is favored to take the gold medal. But Benoit arrives at the Games with a sense of having already won something...