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Games are mere weeks away
Just about a month now until the opening ceremonies. I'll be heading Down Under in a couple weeks, so be on the lookout for updates from U.S. training camps in Australia. Who do you think will win the gold medals in basketball and team handball?
The U.S. teams are head and shoulders above the competition in both basketball tournaments. Granted the U.S. men are missing some key ingredients. Shaquille O'Neal, the NBA's regular season and playoffs MVP, repeatedly said he had no desire to play. Tim Duncan will use the Olympic period to continue rehabbing from knee surgery and get ready for Spurs training camp. Grant Hill broke his ankle late in the season and will not have recovered. In spite of all this, the U.S. team is a strong favorite. Russia and Yugoslavia, the team's closest pursuers, also have notable absentees. Russian captain and point guard Vasily Karasyov has opted out, citing, of all things, lingering poor health after having his tonsils removed. Stanislav Yeryomin, the team's head coach, logically has questioned Karasyov's desire to play for the team. Vlade Divac and Alexandar Djordjevic will not play for Yugoslavia because they each want to spend time with their families. On the women's side, the U.S. is 23-1 with three golds in the last four Olympics. The only defeat in that span was a 79-73 loss to the Unified Team in the semifinals of the '92 Barcelona Games. I like the host Australians and Russians to provide the strongest opposition. I like the Swedes to win the men's handball event, atoning for their disappointment in Atlanta where they lost to the Croatians 27-26 in the final game. Russia, Spain and Yugoslavia also have strong teams. Spain is my dark horse. The team is led by King Juan Carlos' son-in-law Inaki Urdangarin, the Duke of Palma de Mallorca. I like Norway to win the women's final. The Norwegians survived a double-overtime final to beat France for the '99 world championship, when 1996 gold medalist Demark did not have a good tournament. The Danes, Austrians, French and Koreans are Norway's strongest challengers. In the recently completed U.S. wrestling trials, three past medalists in Greco (Dennis Hall, Brandon Paulson and Matt Ghaffari) all got dumped in the finals. What are your thoughts on this changing of the guard? Paulson's story was particularly compelling because he had to win several Olympic qualifiers for the U.S. to even have a spot in Sydney at that weight. He then won the U.S. nationals at his weight and seemed to be on track to make it to Sydney.
The guard certainly is changing in Greco. It's true Paulson qualified a spot in the Olympic tournament for the U.S. But so, too, to use freestyle analogies, did Les Gutches and Stephen Neal, a pair of gold-medal threats who were beaten at the trials. It happens every year, especially in a sport like wrestling where it is so hard to stay on top. It makes you appreciate guys like Alexander Karelin, who never loses anything. At 38, Ghaffari was seen as a sentimental longshot by many, so he did well just to get to the final. He's a personable guy with a good career ahead of him in some sort of public capacity. He will have to live without that victory against Karelin he wanted so badly. Paulson wrestled a closer match in the Atlanta final than the 5-1 score indicated. But he left himself open against Armen Nazarian from Armenia, and that bad mistake cost him four crucial points. He did well in his second life with the Minnesota Golden Gophers after coming back from nasty ankle surgery. But remember that the guy who beat him in Dallas, Steven Mays, nearly beat him in '96 and soundly whooped him 3-0 and 5-0 in two trials matches this year. Isn't it high time that athletes like Michael Johnson and Maurice Greene who've earned their stripes by recording American, world or Olympic records be awarded automatic spots in the Games instead of having to go through grueling trials ? I mean, after the Dan O'Brien debacle in 1992, the U.S. Olympic Committee should have made this much needed change.
This is a tough issue that different sports have tried tackling in different ways. Cycling picked its '96 team using a straight trials system and the squad didn't perform up to standards. This year the only people who received automatic berths based on trials victories were the winners of the road events. All the others, including Lance Armstrong and Marty Nothstein, were coaches' picks. Besides losing Johnson and Greene from the 200 meters, the U.S. track and field team will be without pole vaulter Jeff Hartwig and high jumper Tisha Waller entirely. The women's gymnastics team will be Bela Karolyi's call (it's a four-person committee, but word is Bela gets five votes), and he will base his choices as much on training camps as on the nationals and trials. Because of all the talent in this country, the U.S. swim trials are bound to eliminate at least a couple of medal favorites. I can see giving, say, one spot as an automatic berth if you have a world or Olympic champion. The athlete would still have to meet very strong minimum requirements to prove that s/he was still at least No. 1 in the country before the trials. The ambiguity as to who would and wouldn't fit into this category leaves governing bodies open to lawsuits or at least binding arbitration from the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and that's no way to pick an Olympic team. In situations where you have only one spot available (e.g., wrestling and boxing), I would not allow any automatic berths. Will diver Fu Mingxia of China be in Sydney, and if so will she compete on platform, springboard or both? Do you think she has a shot at a medal?
Fu is back diving again. As of this writing she had competed in three World Cup events, each time placing second on the three-meter springboard behind teammate Guo Jingjing. The events took place in Sydney (in January), Xian City, China (May) and Hong Kong (June). Guo is definitely China's best on the springboard. Fu is a strong challenger for the second spot, but so is Wu Mingxia. Look for Li Na and either Xu Mian or Sang Xue to make a strong team on platform. Why isn't golf an Olympic sport?
We had a question about golf in a previous Mailbag, so there must a lot of good players out there. Golf actually was part of the Olympic program in 1900 (St. Louis) and 1904 (Paris), but not since. Golf's limited appeal became apparent four years later when all three team medals were won by American club teams. (In those days countries could field more than one squad in a team sport.) There was some support for reintroducing golf at the Atlanta Games if the event could be held at Augusta National, home of the Masters, but that fell through. Golf is no longer a game with limited geographic appeal and it is certainly more accessible to the masses than it was at the start of the 20th century. But at a time when the IOC is trying to keep the number of athletes at a Summer Games to a manageable 10,000, it will be increasingly harder for new sports to join the fray. Why must Maurice Greene continue to admire his upper body before, during and after his races? If Greene is so focused on showing off his well-defined abs, he will surely lose every damn race in Sydney.
I think the whole ab thing started with Ben Johnson who, as it turned out, had some assistance with his physique. It's become an accepted part of the sprinting strut to flaunt the pecs as soon as a race is over. I doubt it would have happened in Jesse Owens' day. I don't like this fad, either, but I can't say Maurice Greene is even the worst offender. Greene is not a bad guy, by the way, once you talk to him, but his pre-race walk, his wagging tongue, his stare into the adjacent lane at the guy in second place at 90 meters and, yes, his ab displays are simply a part of this different era. Whatever happened to Amanda Beard? I haven't heard anything about her since Atlanta. Will she be in Sydney?
Beard is participating in the U.S. trials, but the University of Arizona student is a very different swimmer than the one who won a gold and two silvers in 1996 as a 14-year-old. For one thing, she has chucked the stuffed bear she used to carry around with her everywhere. Now she has tattoos and a tongue stud. Beard quit the sport briefly in 1997, but came back and had her best outing at the short-course nationals last December when, with the additional turns in the pool, she set a U.S. record. Still, she was ranked only 23rd and 26th nationally in the long-course events last year. And she has some work to do if she's going to challenge either Kristy Kowal or Megan Quann for one of the two breaststroke spots at either 100m or 200m. Sports Illustrated writer-reporter Brian Cazeneuve is the magazine's resident Olympics guru. He'll answer your questions on the first Wednesday of each month leading into Sydney. Click here to send him a question.
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