| overrated |
| Major indoor track meets |
Remember how much fun these used to be? With packed houses, unpredictable boards, intense rivalries and intimate tracks that came right to the edge of the front-row seats -- this was in-your-face track before all those designer sports were so in-your-face. We've gone backward. Now, indoor track is so-called because of little more than the roof overhead. Many meets are held in domes, which strips them of all their charm. Athletes are so concerned with records that they will only compete on perfectly arched, low-banked boards on long tracks that simply don't fit into smaller buildings. Fans are so far from the action that what little noise they make is swallowed by the cavernous confines. Can we drop the indoor records, snuggle up and enjoy indoor track again before it becomes irrelevant?
|
| underrated |
| Paula Radcliffe |
Given where women's marathoning was not long ago, Radcliffe's 2:15:25 world record in London is the performance of this and many a year prior. Considering just how adamant she has been in her anti-doping stance -- at a 2001 race she held up a sign reading "EPO Cheats Out" in protest of the participation of a runner who had tested positive for the banned performance-enhancing hormone, and she also calls for lifetime bans for cheaters -- one might actually make the leap of faith that Radcliffe is clean.
|
| annoying |
| The misleading, misinforming, positively evil word "supplement" |
How many athletes have taken what they claim to be -- or even believe is -- a harmless, helpful substance on the say-so of some quack vitamin-store salesman, when, in fact, they ingested a drug that puts them at an unfair advantage over their competition and unnecessarily jeopardizes their own health? A drug is a drug. A steroid is a steroid. If the appropriate oversight panel hasn't classified andro or some other harmful drug as what it is, let's refer to it as a more dubious-sounding "unclassified substance" and save the word supplement for vitamin C.
|
| breakthrough performance of 2003 |
| Misty May and Kerri Walsh |
In their third season as a team, May and Walsh won their first Beach Volleyball World Championship, knocking off two-time defending champs Adriana Behar and Shelda Bede of Brazil. May and Walsh erased the bad memory of a ninth-place finish at the 2001 worlds and also went 39-0 this season -- an AVP Tour record.
|
| uplifting |
| Carrie Boudreau |
The most uplifting athlete is, appropriately, a weightlifter. Boudreau underwent a mastectomy in May and then began chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer. But instead of giving up her passion, the 36-year-old schoolteacher from Maine arranged her treatments around her training and competitions so she could compete at the Pan-Am Games in Santo Domingo this August. Boudreau finished well out of the medals in the 58-kilogram class, but you couldn't miss her. Because she had lost all her hair during treatment, Boudreau received special permission from the International Weightlifting Federation to wear a bandana during the competition. She wore one adorned with the stars and stripes and looked terribly pale throughout the meet. Boudreau nevertheless completed two legal lifts to earn a seventh-place finish and lasting admiration.
|
| mvp |
| Richard Pound |
Since we're talking Most Valuable Person, here's a nod to the outspoken, uncompromising head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. People have mixed feelings about the Canadian, who lost out to Jacques Rogge in his bid for the IOC Presidency in 2001 and has never held back his opinions or frustrations about anything. The WADA chairmanship may have been a consolation prize, but Pound has taken its obligations to heart, fighting tirelessly to clean up Olympic sports, ripping Major League Baseball for its laughable drug-testing sham and even crossing some powerful sports administrators who are less vigilant than he.
|
| storyline to follow in 2004 |
| Athens |
Will the Athens Olympics be beset with inconvenient glitches or, worse yet, security nightmares -- or will the Games remind us of others (Barcelona, Melbourne) that came together successfully at the last minute?
|
|
