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Going Four Gold At 35, Germany’s Georg Hackl is sliding for Olympic historyGeorg Hackl is 5'8" tall and shaped like a football, his 179 pounds spread over his frame as if it were a warm layer of soft, freshly baked bread. He can't run fast, jump high or lift massive amounts of weight, and if you had to identify the sport in which he is an international star, you would guess bowling, or maybe bass fishing. He is the pudgy neighbor mowing his lawn in tight gym shorts, the social studies teacher in polyester Sansabelts, the little kid who could never get a game.Yet Hackl, a 35-year-old German, can make Olympic history tomorrow by winning his fourth consecutive gold medal in luge. (He had the fastest practice run of the day yesterday; competition opens at 4 p.m. today with two runs at Utah Olympic Park.) No athlete in Winter Olympics history has won the same event four times in a row -- beloved U.S. speed skater Bonnie Blair is among several to have won three straight -- and if Hackl had been half a second faster in Calgary in 1988, he would be gunning for number five. Just as im portant as his records, his presence demands that we reconsider precisely what makes a person an athlete.
Hackl rides as still as a corpse, his movements are more subtle than a whisper, his driving line a work of art. His skill and focus are no less impressive than that of the quarterback who doesn't hear the crowd. On Hackl's best runs his sled seems to float rather than carve. For a decade and a half he has sat chilly on a small piece of plastic, staying cooler than the rest, turning calm into speed, the best at what he does. —Tim Layden Happy Harada's Leap of FaithFor five days earlier this month Masahiko Harada of Japan trained in vain on the ski jumping hills in Nagano. He searched for the perfect form that would land gold in Salt Lake City but found nothing. Then he began experimenting. "I tried to jump without anything on my mind," says Harada, "and I made a successful jump."That has been the story for much of Harada's career: major league ability brought down by a minor league psyche. Four years ago in Nagano, Harada followed a sack-of-potatoes jump of 79.5 meters with a 137-meter bomb that propelled Japan to the team gold in the K120 competition and turned "Happy" Harada into one of the country's most beloved figures. This morning, when Harada, 33, begins what is expected to be his last Olympics in the men's K90 finals, he'll take his new technique to the top of the hill. "This time," Harada says, "I've figured out how to make February the time when I peak." —Gene Menez A Second for Bahrke Is Also a FirstShannon Bahrke reveled in a day of firsts on Saturday. Bahrke's silver medal in moguls, behind favorite Kari Traa of Norway, was the first for any U.S. athlete at the Salt Lake Games. (Speed skater Derek Parra followed her performance less than three hours later with a silver in the 5,000 meters.) The Olympic rookie also had three dozen family members in attendance, including her grandparents Carol and Harold Bahrke from Los Angeles, who had never before seen her compete in person. "I can't believe I'm on the podium, let alone the first American to win a medal," Bahrke said. An Alpine racer in high school, Bahrke, 21, nearly saw her ski career end in 1999 when she contracted a staph infection that entered her bloodstream. Daily doses of antibiotics were fed directly into her heart for six weeks, and in December, in just her second full season since she fell ill, she defeated teammate Hannah Hardaway at the U.S. nationals.
—Brian Cazeneuve A Lot of Wiggle Room in Salt LakeResidents of the Wasatch Valley are celebrating more this month than just global togetherness and the noble spirit of athletic competition. Today marks the beginning of JELL-O Week. And boy, do Utahns like their JELL-O. According to Kraft Foods, the company that makes the sugary, wiggly dessert, the average Utah household purchases 21 servings of its colored gelatin every year -- the most in the country and twice the national consumption.Why the JELL-O jones? Members of the Mormon Church make up 63% of the state's population, and their emphasis on family and frugality, as well as their religion's ban on coffee and tea, would seem to go a long way to explain why JELL-O is so popular. The state's ardor is currently on display at the Traveling JELL-O Museum (at the ZCMI Center Mall until March 5). "People in Utah are unabashedly, unashamedly JELL-O fans," says Lynne Belluscio, the curator of the JELL-O Museum in LeRoy, N.Y., where the dessert was invented. "It's just a JELL-O rich environment." —Mark Beech |
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