Olympic Gold Medal

Former 400-meter world champion Antonio Pettigrew was found dead Tuesday, the university where he worked as a coach said. Pettigrew, who is survived by his wife and son, had been an assistant track coach at North Carolina for the past four seasons. The 42-year-old Pettigrew, who was stripped of an Olympic gold medal in 2000 after admitting to doping, was found unresponsive by friends in the back seat of his vehicle in Chatham County in central North Carolina early Tuesday.

Johns Hopkins senior running Andrew Kase , who led the Blue Jays to a 10-3 record, the Centennial Conference championship and a trip to the NCAA quarterfinals, has been named a third-team d3football.com All-American. Johns Hopkins finished No. 8 in the final AFCA Poll and 11th in the final d3football.com poll. College basketball: UMES junior Kevin White was named the school's Athlete of the Week. White, a guard, scored a career-high 16 points in an 87-46 loss to Wright State on Saturday in Dayton, Ohio.

There was almost more action in the medical tent than on the court yesterday at the $100,000 Nestea Open at Baltimore, as the heat and humidity forced two teams to bail out of the two-man pro beach volleyball tournament.Adam Johnson and Jose Loiola lost a crack at first place and a $20,000 winners' purse when dehydration forced Johnson out of the finals of the Association of Volleyball Professionals event. Mike Dodd and Mike Whitmarsh won the title.Loiola missed out on more than extra money and a nice trophy.

LONDON -- Meldrick Taylor, coming off his three-round knockout by junior middleweight champion Terry Norris, moves back to the welterweight division Saturday night. But Lou Duva wants the WBA 147-pound champion going back even further, to when he was the 125-pound Olympic champion.Duva has bought T-shirts inscribed "1984" as a reminder of the style that gained Taylor the Olympic gold medal that year."I'm taking him back in time," the trainer said. "For a while there, he got away from what he does best.

JONESBORO, Ga. -- Now we know what a beach volleyball star wears to an Olympic medal ceremony: a red, white and blue warm-up suit, a pink cap and bare feet.Karch Kiraly stood on the podium again yesterday, only this time there were flecks of sand clinging to his toes and eight more years of digs, spikes, cuts and sets clinging to his memory as he stared at the American flag rising before him.Otherwise, it could have been Los Angeles or Seoul, South Korea. There in the stands was his family, including his lean and proud father, Las, the Hungarian immigrant who was tearfully waving the flag of his adopted nation.

Linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo wasn't the only athlete stunned by a letter from a Maryland politician urging the Ravens to silence the outspoken Ayanbadejo due to his support for same-sex marriage. In an open response to the letter written by Maryland Del. Emmett C. Burns Jr., a Democrat from Baltimore County, Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe wrote that he was "ashamed and disgusted" by Burns' views and characterized the delegate as "mind-bogglingly stupid. " In an expletive-laden letter posted on sports blog Deadspin , Kluwe - who has been similarly vocal to Ayanbadejo as a proponent for gay marriage - took particular issue with Burns' assertion that political views have "no place in a sport.

WASHINGTON -- Andrew Maynard set his sights on WBA light-heavyweight king Tommy Hearns after stopping shopworn former champion Saad Muhammad after 20 seconds of the third round of their scheduled 10-round bout at the Convention Center.Maynard, who has lost only to Bobby Czyz in his 19 professional bouts after winning the 1988 Olympic gold medal, pummeled Muhammad, 37, from the opening bell. After Muhammad was cornered at the start of round three and caught with at least 20 unanswered blows, referee Sylvester Stevens mercifully stopped the mismatch.

* Regina Carrol, 49, an actress who appeared in such films as "The Beat Generation," "Viva Las Vegas" and "The Glass Bottom Boat," died at her St. George, Utah, home Nov. 4 of cancer. Ms. Carrol, whose real name was Regina Gelfan, also appeared in such television programs as "The Dinah Shore Show," "Route 66" and "Ozzie and Harriet." But she may have been best known, especially to horror movie fans, for a string of "B" pictures directed by her husband, Al Adamson. Among them were "Satan's Sadists," "Man With the Synthetic Brain," "The Female Bunch," "Angels' Wild Women," "Brain of Blood" and "Dracula vs. Frankenstein."

* Dr. Arthur Wint, a gold medal-winning runner in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics and Jamaica's former ambassador to Britain, died Monday at a hospital after suffering a lung ailment. He was 72. Dr. Wint won the 400-meter race in 46.2 seconds at the 1948 Olympics at London's Wembley Stadium, giving the Caribbean nation its first Olympic gold medal. Dr. Wint won the 800 meters silver medal in the 1948 Games and the 800 meters silver medal and the 4 x 400 meters gold medal in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland.

ALBERTVILLE, France -- On a bright, beautiful day, there was no snow, no fog, no rain and no punctuation marks.AJ Kitt, so fast the periods blew off his name, came to the Olympics yesterday.Unofficially, he is the cover boy of the Albertville Winter Games. He is an American who takes on mountains, a downhiller who streaks across ice and snow and leaves behind a white jet stream.This drag-racer on skis took on the Bellevarde face in Val d'Isere. It was just a practice run before Sunday's Olympic main event, the men's downhill.