Word: gymnastics
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Enter challenger Michael Weiss, 21, who's been beefing up his rebel routine. He pumps iron with his father Greg, a former Olympic gymnast, for an hour every day in addition to half an hour of cardiovascular training, 45 minutes of stretching and four hours of skating. "Not being one of the favorites, it'll be important for me [at Nagano] to have something extra," he says candidly. That something extra is the elusive quad, the Holy Grail of men's competition--four revolutions and a one-foot landing. No American man has ever managed to nail one in competition...
When the Soyuz capsule bearing the ill-fated Mir crew hit the Kazakh steppe in mid-August, the landing "wasn't as soft as it could have been," engineer Alexander Lazutkin later recalled. The former gymnast has clearly mastered the art of Right Stuff understatement. In his spartan apartment on the edge of Moscow, Lazutkin speaks of Mir in the most sanguine tones. "The inquisition is over," he reports, "and so far, no fines...
...even that moment was soon overtaken by the hyped and sodden Summer Olympics in Atlanta, in which heroism and tragedy were defined by a small female gymnast with a twisted ankle...
Kerri Strug's torn ligament at the Olympics may be the cloud with the fattest silver lining ever. The gutsy gymnast isn't letting her pint-size voice stop her from hitting the big time. Instead of touring with the rest of her team, she's working on two books, a TV-movie deal, a cameo on Beverly Hills, 90210, a tour with the Ice Capades, and maybe even a gymnastics exhibition. Oh, and college...
Thus the concussion passes through the medium of media. The accidental video's evil instant becomes a sudden, globally repeated icon, replayed insistently until it erases the 1996 Olympics' prior signature of celebration and courage, the image of a young gymnast performing through her pain. In a split second, the story changes utterly, and so, for the moment at least, does the moral of the story. That's what bombs are for--to redirect the story line, or obliterate its earlier meaning...