Olympic Team

NAGANO, Japan -- Olympic T-shirts were difficult to find in Nagano, sweat shirts next to impossible. Snowlet mascot dolls sold out by the end of the first week, and organizers did not replenish the supplies.Street vendors, corporate tents, all those other staples of Atlanta 1996 -- they were kept to a minimum. The commercial scene was decidedly, and deliberately, low-key."It has been more muted," said G. Frank Joklik, president of the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee. "In Atlanta, there were some expressions of doubt afterward whether such an experience should be repeated."

BOULDER, Colo. -- One of these days, Mark and Gwyn Coogan will get their hectic lives in sync. They won't be forced to juggle their training schedules with daughter Katrina's nap time. They won't have to tap-dance around each other's ricocheting emotions.They certainly won't be under the pressure, and spotlight, they seem to be under now.It has been building since mid-February, when Mark Coogan made his first Olympic team by finishing second to Bob Kempainen in the men's marathon trials in Charlotte, N.C. Coogan's greatest athletic moment came a week after Gwyn had just missed making her second Olympic team by finishing fourth at the women's trials in Columbia, S.C.What made matters worse was the reaction from the couple's friends and family members, as well as from acquaintances and even total strangers who live in this running-crazed community.

ATLANTA -- The morning after finishing the Olympic trials last month in Boston, the U.S. men's gymnastics team flew here on its way to a training camp in Spartanburg, S.C. But before the team took a bus up the interstate, coach Peter Kormann had his team visit the Georgia Dome."

Swimming has taken Michelle Griglione all over the world, has provided her a college education and, for the past 12 years, has been the vehicle on which she has ridden a wild roller coaster of competitive emotions.Griglione, 26, has eight medals from world-class events and an attic full of other mementos from a career that began at the Y in Alexandria, Va., when she was 6."She finished sixth and got a pink ribbon, but she loved it because pink was her favorite color," Carolyn Griglione said of her only child's first race.

ATLANTA -- Jackie Joyner-Kersee made her fourth U.S. Olympic team last night, but something strange happened in the last three events of the heptathlon. Joyner-Kersee lost her lead and, for the first time since 1984, lost a heptathlon competition that she completed."In all honesty, I don't like losing," said Joyner-Kersee, who came into the final event leading by 116 points. She wound up losing to Kelly Blair by a mere three points after finishing next-to-last in the 800 meters.It was her first loss in a completed heptathlon since finishing behind Glynis Nunn of Australia in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

Life is moving at a fast pace for a former Wilde Lake soccer standout.Hamisi Amani-Dove, a 21-year-old striker who also starred for Rutgers, has spent the past three months in Amsterdam trying to market his soccer skills, and his gamble appears to have paid off.He'll return to Holland to play for a professional team in August, but first he is training with the U.S. Olympic team hopefuls in Northern Virginia.He also was drafted by a U.S. professional team, the New York/New Jersey Metro Stars in the new Major League Soccer.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Anita Nall did not make the 1996 Olympic team last night, but she and North Baltimore Aquatic Club coach Murray Stephens both agreed that she did take a giant step toward re-establishing herself as one of the world's top swimmers in the breaststroke.Nall, who was ranked 84th in the world in the 100-meter breaststroke last year, shaved nearly two seconds off her qualifying time during a preliminary heat yesterday morning and improved on that effort to finish fourth in the 100-meter final at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials.

WASHINGTON -- Thori Staples lost her starting position on the U.S. women's national soccer team in training camp last fall, when she was struggling and veteran Brandi Chastain was moved from midfield to defense.Now Staples, a former Joppatowne High and North Carolina State star, seems in danger of losing out on a chance to be part of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team. Evidence of that came in yesterday's game against China at RFK Stadium.After playing a combined 54 minutes in the first two games of the three-game U.S. Women's Cup, Staples didn't leave the sidelines during her team's 1-0 victory yesterday.

ATLANTA -- In 1956, a U.S. Olympic men's basketball team led by collegiate stars Bill Russell and K. C. Jones won its games by an average of 53.5 points.Did anyone demand the next Olympic team be composed of high school players?In 1960, an Olympic team featuring Jerry West, Oscar Robertson and Jerry Lucas won its games by an average of 42.4 points.Did anyone decry that outcome?Enough whining about the Dream Team already. Yes, it's going to beat Yugoslavia tonight for the gold medal. Yes, it's still far ahead of the rest of the world.

GAITHERSBURG -- She is no longer the shy little girl from Montgomery County who seemed younger than her age, no longer the latest in a recent line of America's pixie gymnasts.She is no longer the 15-year-old who made her first Olympic team or the 17-year-old who won her first U.S. championship.Dominique Dawes is all grown up, with one place left to go before she calls it a career: Atlanta for the 1996 Olympic Games.Recovered from the injuries that sapped her confidence and sidelined her for last year's world championships, rejuvenated by the months she spent going to classes and living in a dorm at the University of Maryland, and very much relieved to be finished with a nerve-racking but successful performance in the recent Olympic trials, Dawes has reinvented herself.

The decision to yank Annapolis sailor Farrah Hall from the Beijing Olympic team in favor of Nancy Rios never passed the sniff test. Lame excuses by US Sailing about its unilateral ruling in October 2007 only made things worse. Now, a panel convened by the U.S. Olympic Committee has found that Hall was judged by a kangaroo court that ignored federal law and followed its own rules that were, at best, written in the dirt with a stick. In a 23-page ruling, the hearing panel called the situation created by US Sailing "a procedural nightmare" that could have been avoided if Hall had been allowed to defend herself.

BEIJING - In a nation of 1.3 billion people, she was one of the best in a sport held in higher regard than all others. Trouble was, fourth best was good enough only to get Wang Chen bounced from China's Olympic table tennis team. Not once but twice. She is now one of 39 foreign-born athletes occupying a place on a U.S. Olympic team, and she's fulfilling a dream by competing in her hometown, even though she is doing it in a uniform not of red, but of red, white and blue. For Chen, this was far from her plan.

Annapolis windsurfer Farrah Hall and her Olympic dream might be nearing a third and final strike. A race jury denied her appeal yesterday, reaffirming its initial ruling that sends Florida windsurfer Nancy Rios to the Summer Games in China and leaves Hall at home. "I am disillusioned and bitterly disappointed with the committee's actions," Hall said in a statement released yesterday afternoon. Hall's protest over the results from the Olympic trials and an earlier jury decision was considered over two days and in separate hearings last week in Providence, R.I. With the announcement yesterday, Hall is expected to exhaust what might be her remaining options: the U.S. Olympic Committee review board and a date next month with a California arbitrator.

Luge BRIAN MARTIN and MARK GRIMMETTE TV: Chs. 11,4; 8-11:30 p.m. -- It seems that the only thing standing between the U.S. luge doubles team of Brian Martin and Mark Grimmette and the gold medal is Curve 14. That bend in the track has bedeviled the pair - and other sliders - since last February. In the 10 years Martin, 32, and Grimmette, 35, have been a team, they've won the bronze in 1998 and the silver in 2002. But they've been on a puzzling downward slide for the past several months.

SESTRIERE, Italy-- --The news broke earlier in the day that Michelle Kwan was catching an early flight home. She had hurt herself and was withdrawing from the Olympics. And now Bode Miller was high on the mountain, preparing for his own takeoff. He shot out of the start gate and flew down the hill. It was a good run, a fast run -- but a fifth-place run. "It would have taken a hurricane wind to get me into first," he'd explain. Later in the evening, Apolo Ohno, the third prong of the mighty American trident, flew around a speed-skating track, but not fast enough to defend his Olympic crown.

Speedy Peterson has a jump he hopes will take the Olympic judges' breath away the first time they see it. It sure took his away one of the first times he tried it. The Hurricane is perhaps the most difficult jump an aerial skier can pull from his bag of tricks. In layman's terms, it is three back flips and five twists performed 40-50 feet off the ground. "I call it the Hurricane because you feel like you're in a hurricane and you can't see the snow until the last second," said Peterson, 24, of Boise, Idaho.

In a shocking development, the five-member committee charged with evaluating figure skater Michelle Kwan on Friday decided to uphold the medical bye that placed her on the U.S. Olympic team. There really was never any doubt U.S. Figure Skating would keep Kwan on the team, and - as I pointed out Friday - she could have gotten stuck under the Zamboni and still would be on her way to Turin. The only thing that was truly surprising was that it took an hour to come to that decision after Kwan performed her short and long programs back-to-back in Los Angeles.

ST. LOUIS -- Two weeks from now, Michelle Kwan and Emily Hughes will be skating in parallel universes. Hughes, the third-place finisher at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships that ended Saturday night, is scheduled to compete before a crowd at the Four Continents competition in Colorado Springs, Colo., the last major event before the Olympics. Kwan, a nine-time national title holder, will be skating before a committee of five on her home ice in Southern California, trying to prove she is physically able to take her place on the Olympic team, a spot that might have been Hughes'.

ST. LOUIS -- Kimmie Meiss- ner has final exams this week at Fallston High School, including one in French. She'd be better off working on her Italian, because she has another final coming next month at figure skating's biggest event: the Winter Olympics. The 16-year-old from Bel Air finished second to Sasha Cohen at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships on Saturday night and was named to her first Olympic team. "I didn't get any sleep, like two hours," she said yesterday after a practice session early in the morning.

ST.LOUIS -- Only two women have beaten Sasha Cohen in her previous five appearances at the senior level of the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. Neither is here this year. One is Sarah Hughes, who finished ahead of Cohen in the 2003 competition the year after her gold-medal performance at the Winter Olympics. The other is Michelle Kwan, the skating legend who beat both Hughes and Cohen in 2003 and bested Cohen four other times for the national title. But the five-time world champion is home in California, on the mend from groin and hip injuries.