Star-Spangled Home Team

By Tom Callahan

U.S. Olympians are certain to give the nation something to shout about

In the absence of the East Germans, the Soviets and the other Communist boycotters, the medal yield of the U.S. team is sure to be markedly inflated, though the spirit of the athletes may not be deflated in the least. This is almost certainly the best American Olympic team in history, the first true team as one thinks of a team, convened if not assembled the year round. These 630 men and women, from Yachtsman William Buchan, 49, to Gymnast Michelle Dusserre, 15, are the long-awaited first crop from the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, the charter beneficiaries of the stepped-up Olympic job program, the modern training center in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the newest biomechanical technologies.

Prospects for the men's track-and-field team would be bright in any company ("I'm looking forward to gloating over the performances of U.S. athletes," Men's Coach Larry Ellis cannot resist saying), and before the boycott, the track women were poised to re-emerge as a significant power after twelve years without a gold medal. "The U.S. has the most diversified gene pool, the best facilities and the best coaching," says Women's Coach Brooks Johnson. "It was a myth that the athletes are better or that the coaching is better behind the Iron Curtain. We're now getting what they had all along--financial support. When credibility is established, that's the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place. By staying away, they're just accelerating that."

Should the U.S. now dominate the Games for the first time since 1968, some collective credibility will be tempered, but the individual gains should be as rich as ever. In addition to Carl Lewis, America certainly has an Olympian abundance:

It seems odd and a little poignant to think that this will be Mary Decker's first Olympics, so familiar is the slight 5-ft. 6-in., 108-lb. figure of the finest female middle-distance runner in the U.S., and so extensive is her body of work. From 800 meters to 10,000, she has broken seven world records and essentially every American mark indoors, outdoors or on the highway. But Decker runs so hard, she powders her bones. Her shins, ankles and feet have been in and out of the shop since Little Mary was twelve, when she ran a marathon one day and a 440 and 880 the next. "From the knees up, she's world class," says her coach, Dick Brown. "Although her knees and lungs and heart and mind want to go 80 miles a week, her calves and ankles can't take it."

But she has evidently found some restraint at 25, and comes whole to her Olympics, choosing to run the 3,000 and pass the 1,500, though qualified to try both. At last month's trials, winding up four preliminaries and two finals over just six days, Decker finished second in the 1,500, her first loss in four years. Reasoning that "one gold is better than two silvers," she has elected a showdown with South African Sprite Zola Budd, though Decker claims to be more concerned about Rumanian Marciana Puica. In the Helsinki world championships last summer, Decker won both, running Soviet Zamira Zaitseva into the ground. Boycotters Zaitseva and Tatyana Kazankina would be missed more in Los Angeles if that picture were not so fresh and fabulous.

Divorced from Marathoner Ron Tabb since 1982, Decker has wrapped herself in the huge protective arms of British Discus Thrower Richard Slaney, who helps shoo away intruders, roughly everyone. She has become a private athlete. If Carl Lewis would be king of the Games, Decker means to be queen. Both have resisted staying in the Village among the commoners, but the U.S. Olympic Committee has insisted, and the two are expected to check in at least.

Regarding temperament, no athlete of the past eight years has logged more success or felt less appreciated than Edwin Moses, 28. After he and Mike Shine brought the U.S. both the gold and the silver in the 400-meter hurdles at Montreal in 1976, their joyous victory lap faded quickly. "I had a gold medal and a world record," Moses says, "but guys who had never competed in the Olympics were getting top billing over me." He reacted badly, and the popular descriptions of him in press accounts became "sullen" and "angry."

Part of the problem was that his event had no glamorous tradition, no particular identity. Moses was actually a failed high hurdler and quarter-miler who turned to the 400-meter hurdles in 1975 looking for an easier chance to reach the Olympics.

When the Montreal excitement did not take, he perversely turned the early race into the most predictable event in track, until that became its own kind of drama. Moses won ten races in a row, then 20. "When I got to about 30 or 35, I remember saying to myself, 'Well, 41 races has been the most ever won by a hurdler.' " Since Aug. 26, 1977, Moses has not lost in 102 races, posting 18 of the best 20 times ever.

Once a physics major at Morehouse College in Atlanta, he tried an office job several years ago, designing weapons systems for the Navy, and lasted about six months. He says, "I look at track from an artistic as well as a business point of view. It's more than just a sport. It's my life." Though he should tear through the Olympics, Moses feels the competition gaining. "Now when I run, people stop and tune in on the race. There's more pressure on me, of course. I have something to lose." But he is a star of the meet at last, cool and calm.

Had High Jumper Dwight Stones won the gold medal as he predicted--no, promised--in 1976, he would probably be a spectator by now, a television commentator most likely. As it happens, he is a part-time member of the ABC Olympic broadcasting team. Eleven years after making his first world mark at 19, the lovable loudmouth in the Mickey Mouse shirt flopped backward over a 7-ft. 8-in. bar last month at the trials and landed somewhere in his own past, right back in the thick of the sport.

Stones' previous U.S. record (7 ft. 7 1/4 in.) was set in 1976, four days, unfortunately, after his second bronze Olympics. In Montreal, he griped about the stadium's (still) unfinished roof for a week, and ended up being psyched-out by a rain spot on the runway. Similarly noisy and self-destructive were his signature quarrels with amateur athletic officials, who declared him a professional in 1978 for taking $33,633 over the table in a televised "superstars" competition. When it started to appear that Stones would be shut out of an amateur's income for good, he abruptly discovered diplomacy, refunded the small change and was reinstated.

For the eight years he was between records, Stones was kneaded mentally and physically by Weight Lifter-Psychologist Harry Sneider at Ambassador College in Pasadena, Calif., home base for the worldwide Church of God. They do more than just prepare for a competition, they foretell it, envision it and rehearse it, complete with sound effects. "It's like playing a whole game of chess in your mind," says Sneider, who used to wipe the brow of Chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer before matches. Mystically, Stones says, "some things about jumping came to me recently in training sessions, things that were apparently so obvious I missed them. I don't know why they came to me after so many years. I asked Harry why after all this time are these simple things coming to me. He said, 'Dwight, because this is it for you.' "

For 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."

The 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, humidity, injury or pain. It's the pure marathoner in her."

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 nearly as fine.

The most passionate competitor on the entire team may be a swimmer, Rick Carey, 21, the University of Texas junior, academic all-American, computer whiz and sore loser. "Rick not only hates to lose, he hates to go slow," says Coach John Collins of the Badger Swim Club in Larchmont, N. Y. "It's like he has a devil over his shoulder who drives him to go fast." Carey seems to have put behind him his notorious goggle-throwing days. But then, he has not had much occasion for temper lately. He is the world-record holder in both the 100-and 200-meter backstroke, but Carey does not enjoy the pressure of national expectations. "You feel like you're swimming with people on your back," he says.

Short for a backstroker, slightly under 6 ft., he is as strong as, but less stringy than, John Naber, whose gold-medal records from 1976 lasted seven years, until Carey broke them. Naber says, "Rick is driven more by internal motivation than by external competition," which is a good thing. Carey's archrival, East German Dirk Richter, will not be in Los Angeles to push him, one of the keenest losses of the boycott.

On the subjective side of the pool, California Diver Gregory Efthimios Louganis, 24, is held in such complete esteem that his Olympics may resemble a coronation more than a contest. The three-time world champion, who won a silver medal at Montreal, is considered a lock on the 3-meter springboard and merely the favorite on the 10-meter platform. His position in the sport is so proprietary that when a Soviet diver was fatally injured attempting a reverse 3 1/2 tuck at a meet last summer, Louganis felt personally responsible for "pushing people to do these dives." It is not a precarious dive to Louganis, a sensitive introvert whose fear of heights relents only "when there's water underneath."

Fathered by a Samoan teenager, adopted at nine months by the Greek owner of a San Diego fishing-boat dock, Louganis had a stammeringly shy childhood that was further complicated by dyslexia and asthma. Tumbling in gym classes before the age of two and dancing in studio theatricals by three, he started to apply these disciplines to diving at seven with a solitary single-mindedness that may seem a little sad. Socially, he is just now coming out of himself. "If you want to be the best, you have to sacrifice," he says. "This sounds so desperate, but I don't mean it the way it sounds. I didn't have anything else." Though Louganis has never pumped iron, he is as brawny as a weight lifter, and his legs are as developed as a dancer's. At the University of California, Irvine, he majored in drama and minored in dance, including classical ballet.

Olympic Diving Coach Ron O'Brien observes, "Because Greg is stronger, he can go higher and dive slower and smoother. When most divers do a hard dive, they have to hurry to make it. Greg's diving looks like a slow-motion film, and he has a body perfectly proportioned for diving. His lines are graceful and beautiful." As Louganis describes the deliberateness, "A rattlesnake coils up, but he's not going to strike until he has every ounce of explosive power behind him." It is the same in diving.

Since Olga Korbut in 1972, pixies of the balance beam and the parallel bars have been the television stars of the Olympics, and America's leading nominee for sweetheart of the Los Angeles Games is a 4-ft. 10-in. stunt girl named Mary Lou Retton, 16. She is a protegee of Rumanian Defector Bela Karolyi, who coached Nadia Comaneci to perfection in 1976. Two years ago, Retton left her West Virginia coal-country home to be near Karolyi in Houston, citing a reason that is a good commentary on the rigors, some say horrors, of gymnastics: "I knew that if I wanted to have a chance at a medal in the Olympics, I was not going to do it if I stayed home. And I had worked all of those long, hard years." She was 14.

"In 1976 the public fell in love with a 14-year-old teen-ager who was very light, very dynamic, with smooth and coordinated movements," says Karolyi of Comaneci. "In 1984 they are going to see complex athletes who are unbelievably powerful and explosive." Retton's compact, broad-shouldered torso is mounted on stout, muscular legs. "She's strong and quick, but also has a great personality," he says. "She performs as an artist, showing her emotions." Her least favorite apparatus is the beam, a 4-ft. platform for balletic grace, her most enjoyable event the vault, a diving handspring after running fast and hard.

Without the opposition of Boriana Stoyanova of Bulgaria or Natalia Yurchecko of the Soviet Union, Retton is favored for a gold in the vault. But Rumania, the only Soviet-bloc country defying the boycott, has advertised two new teenage Nadias, Ecaterina Szabo and Lavinia Agache. Julianne McNamara, 18, another American pupil of Karolyi's, is given a good chance as well. She is as slender and graceful as her stablemate is robust and dynamic. "The competition is worried about me this time around," Retton says gladly. "I welcome the added pressure. It makes me fight even more."

The best of the American boxers is Mark Breland, 21, a welterweight with a sense of history. "The great world champions," he says flatly, "won the Olympics first." In particular, he refers to Sugar Ray Leonard, whose gold medal in Montreal started Leonard off as a full-blown celebrity and staked him to a professional career of main events only. Now that Breland is not required to face either Serik Konakbaev of the Soviet Union or Candelario Duvergel of Cuba, his task is simpler, though he has beaten both in the past, along with nearly every other 147-pounder in the international arena. While Leon ard lost five amateur bouts, Breland's 105 matches have produced only one defeat, a split decision three years ago to Daryl Anthony, now professional. Three-time world champion, twice the American title holder, Breland is the most accomplished amateur fighter in U.S. history.

At 6 ft. 2 1/2 in., a tower beside standard-size welterweights, Breland is a legendary eater and metabolic wonder who has yet to battle the scale. "I can have ten pancakes at a time," he says. "Then I walk about ten blocks and have to stop some place to eat." A roofer's son, one of six children who grew up in Brooklyn's grim Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, Breland never found boxing particularly fearsome. "I like pain," he says breezily. "Before a fight, I am so hyped up I just want to bust. Everything boils up in me."

Reversing the usual course, he has already had a major acting role in a motion picture, portraying a persecuted black military cadet in The Lords of Discipline. According to Manager-To-Be Shelly Finkel, a rock-music producer, Breland's future has been plotted along these lines: a gold medal in Los Angeles, five or six lucrative years on the world boxing stage and a subsequent career in the movies. Reportedly, a threeyear, $2 million contract from Paramount Studios has been rejected. But the first trappings of wealth have arrived: cousins. "I have so many cousins these days, they ring the phone off the hook. Everybody's become my cousin."

--By Tom Callahan.

Reported by Steven Holmes and Melissa Ludtke/ Los Angeles, with other bureaus

With reporting by Steven Holmes, Melissa Ludtke/ Los Angeles, other bureaus