If Perspiration Could Be Quantified

By Tom Callahan

In his basement an American canoeist who has converted a small coal bin into a stagnant river crouches on one knee and endlessly paddles nowhere. His sloshing is a nighttime sound of the neighborhood. A roller skate wedged beneath his forward foot simulates the bobbing boat. Old mirrors of every shape, rescued from dressers and garage sales, are suspended all around. In each of them, he checks his technique against the home movies he has taken of the Rumanians and Swedes. This is the Olympian getting ready.

The Olympian is distinguished from the garden-variety athlete, at least in the U.S., by a fairly uniform obscurity. Except for two weeks every four years, the Olympian is roundly ignored. Thanks to lavish surpluses from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, amateur facilities and finances have improved. But even in the glamorous -- meaning profitable, marketable -- pursuits like track and field, serious money touches just a few. Maybe only the top performer in only a third of the events is truly thriving. Most Olympians just get by.

The professional baseball and football players of fortune and renown are inclined to minimize their natural talent, preferring to have it said they got the most out of a modest allotment. It's generally not true. A good number, maybe even a majority, are doing things that basically come very easy to them. Once, in an extraordinary fit of conscience -- just for an instant -- the basketball star Elvin Hayes actually refused his paycheck out of a sense that he hadn't earned it. After nearly decapitating Jack Nicklaus during a pro-am tournament, a wretched amateur golfer wondered with a sigh if Nicklaus ever shanked one. Softly, almost apologetically, the game's ultimate champion replied, "Three times, when I was ten."

Which is not to say Hayes and Nicklaus never sweated. But if perspiration could be qualified, broken down and quantified, the Olympian probably distills the purest athletic effort by the drop. The most arcane sports, which include many of the Olympic events, are nearly always learned late and hard, in the U.S. after playing baseball and football for a while. Speed does come naturally to the beautiful racehorses of the running track, like Florence Griffith Joyner, though at the world-class level science kicks in and a specialized knowledge is required. Hobbled running backs reach uncertainly for their hamstrings in panic, but sprinters know every muscle according to its isolated throb, like a subtle note of music distinguishable from all the others by some slight tone, especially now that the concert is near.

Because of the rigidly democratic procedure America employs for selecting its team, in this country the Olympic mountain has two peaks, and many of the athletes are in the process of trying to hold their bodies together after the recent trials for the second climb in September. The strain of it is as heavy as the oofing and puffing of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the regal heptathlete who has transcended her event. Almost nobody knows what in the world a heptathlete does, but almost everyone knows she is the best in the world at doing it.

Carl Lewis, alone, taking his mark in an empty stadium, strikes a gentle tableau. This is his chance to make amends for 1984, when he only won four gold medals. In the long-limbed company of swimmers, the little tadpole Janet Evans seems to represent all the early mornings and late suppers of all the tiny racers in all the neighborhood pools. The great Olympian John Naber laughed wonderfully when someone suggested that age-group swimming is just another kind of phenobarbital prescribed by parents to drain their children of excess energy and make sure they go to Yale. But on their own, a few of the old salts, like the '84 hero Rowdy Gaines, continue to gaze longingly at the pool, as though looking out to sea.

Diving still occupies Greg Louganis but more and more so does dancing, and twelve years after Louganis won his first of three Olympic medals, mortal divers are overtaking him at last (or catching up at least). Watching Louganis in practice wear out the lift to the platform, outstaying the others by hours, makes one wonder how hard he must have toiled before eminence and elevators.

, Olympians are made of stronger, not necessarily better, clay. At the same Olympic parade, such as Montreal's in 1976, the likes of the glorious Shun Fujimoto and the notorious Boris Onischenko can march into the sunlight together. The Soviet army's Major Onischenko came forever to be known as Disonischenko after the fencing segment of the modern pentathlon, when a battery was discovered in his nose cone. Like a burp at a banquet, Boris' epee went off by itself and beeped a phantom touche. The major was briskly spirited away to the U.S.S.R.

Meanwhile, on the other side of deception, the Japanese gymnast Fujimoto broke his leg at the knee near the completion of his floor exercise. Not wanting to worry his coach or teammates, he kept the torturous pain to himself ("My whole blood was boiling at my stomach") and performed wondrously on the side horse before glancing ruefully up at the rings. Everything in Fujimoto's ring routine looked normal until the grimace just before the dismount, when he compounded his fracture with a dislocated knee and crashed in a heroic heap. Last year Tim Daggett also powdered a leg bone, and the training sight of a bandaged man on the rings stirred the memory. Last week he failed to make the team.

Disonischenko is a little hard to reach these days, but Fujimoto doesn't mind updating his emotions in the calm light of all the years that have passed. Was it worth it? Would he still take to the rings? "No!" he shrieks.

The Olympians don't often look so far ahead or behind. They literally put the one foot after the other that the rest of us frequently talk about, tolerating a certain level of anguish for a special plane of excellence. They cover themselves in tape and rosin and chalk, and sometimes glory. They take off in sprays of sawdust and alight in splashes of gold. They're driven, until they're driven out. Olympians are said to have a glow about them, and not just the glow of beaded sweat. But they make others glow as well. They mention who they are and say they are getting ready to go to the Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea, and whole rooms break out in smiles. Whole countries too.