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Nott for nothing Former gymnast/soccer player finds silver lining
SYDNEY, Australia -- On the morning of most FIFA tournament gold medal games, the staff of the international soccer body customarily engages the local organizing committee in a friendly. In the game that preceded the Olympic gold medal matchup in 1996, it was revealed that, on the field of play, Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games worker Tara Nott -- an otherwise engaging type who could've been cast as the fresh-faced, spunky girl-next-door on any sitcom -- doesn't do friendly very well. In the heat of battle Nott upended some geezer from FIFA and was yellow-carded by referee Esse Baharmast. "You have to calm down," Baharmast told Nott. Calming down is not for the 5'1", 105-pound Nott, which may explain why, after only five years of competing, she won a silver medal on Sunday in the first ever women's Olympic weightlifting competition. Nott lifted 82.5 kilograms (181.9 pounds) in the snatch and 102.5 kg (225.75 pounds) in the clean and jerk to finish behind Bulgaria's Izabela Dragneva, earning the first medal of any cast won by a U.S. lifter since Mario Martinez (silver) and Guy Carlton (bronze) did so at the 1984 Games. Had things turned out differently, Nott might have been in Sydney as a gymnast or soccer player. But before Mia Hamm or Dominique Dawes even got out of the preliminaries here in Sydney, Nott was on the second step, waving to her parents, her sister Jeniece, her boyfriend of 11 months, Kevin O'Connor, and a dozen or so other members of an overwhelmed Nott-hole gang.
Nott is part of an engaging four-woman U.S. delegation that will not dominate the competition but that has scored unusually high in appeal. The best known is 17-year-old Cheryl Haworth, 300 pounds of dry wit and preternatural maturity. There is Cara Heads-Lane, a striking woman of 22 who competes in the 75 kg class (165 pounds). Finally, there is Robin Goad, who finished sixth in Nott's 48 kg class (105.8 pounds) on Sunday and may have appreciated the competition more than any other athlete. Having competed in the first women's world championship in 1987, Goad, 30, has since lobbied long and hard to get women into the Olympic program. But the star of the moment is Nott, 28, compactly built and athletically gifted, possibly the prototype for future American lightweight lifters. Her mother, Nada, remembers her daughter coming home from her first gymnastics practice and going splat on the front lawn when she tried to do an aerial. "I saw somebody else do it so I want to do it," Tara told her mother. She says she was a "Kim Zmeskal-type of gymnast," powerful and explosive, rough and tumble. (Goad, too, as it turns out, started as a gymnast.) Nott eventually tired of the gymnastics grind and turned to soccer, in which she and Jeniece formed a formidable 1-2 punch for Blue Valley High in Kansas City. "My main thought was finding Tara and letting her finish," said Jeniece, who was a midfielder. Tara was a star at Colorado College and played on both the under-16 and under-19 national teams but could never crack the national team roster, probably because of her diminutive stature. That compact build, though, was exactly what caught the eye of a couple of U.S. weightlifting officials when they spotted Nott performing her adminstrative soccer duties for ACOG. "Why don't you try lifting?" they suggested, and next thing anyone knew Nott had worked herself up to national class level. Nott, who remembers as a rapt four-year-old watching Nadia Comaneci compete at the '76 Montreal Games, also has a soft spot for anything Olympian. "You put me in front of an Olympics show," says Nott, "and I'll be crying within a minute." She had more personal reason for the tears on Sunday. One can only hope that a certain FIFA official has by now seen that softer side. Sports Illustrated senior writer Jack McCallum is in Sydney covering the Games for the magazine and CNNSI.com. Check back daily to read McCallum's behind-the-scene reports from Down Under.
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