Essay: If Perspiration Could Be Quantified

In his basement an American canoeist who has converted a small coal bin into a stagnant river crouches on one knee and endlessly paddles nowhere. His sloshing is a nighttime sound of the neighborhood. A roller skate wedged beneath his forward foot simulates the bobbing boat. Old mirrors of every shape, rescued from dressers and garage sales, are suspended all around. In each of them, he checks his technique against the home movies he has taken of the Rumanians and Swedes. This is the Olympian getting ready.

The Olympian is distinguished from the garden-variety athlete, at least in the U.S., by a fairly uniform obscurity. Except for two weeks every four years, the Olympian is roundly ignored. Thanks to lavish surpluses from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, amateur facilities and finances have improved. But even in the glamorous -- meaning profitable, marketable -- pursuits like track and field, serious money touches just a few. Maybe only the top performer in only a third of the events is truly thriving. Most Olympians just get by.

The professional baseball and football players of fortune and renown are inclined to minimize their natural talent, preferring to have it said they got the most out of a modest allotment. It's generally not true. A good number, maybe even a majority, are doing things that basically come very easy to them. Once, in an extraordinary fit of conscience -- just for an instant -- the basketball star Elvin Hayes actually refused his paycheck out of a sense that he hadn't earned it. After nearly decapitating Jack Nicklaus during a pro-am tournament, a wretched amateur golfer wondered with a sigh if Nicklaus ever shanked one. Softly, almost apologetically, the game's ultimate champion replied, "Three times, when I was ten."

Which is not to say Hayes and Nicklaus never sweated. But if perspiration could be qualified, broken down and quantified, the Olympian probably distills the purest athletic effort by the drop. The most arcane sports, which include many of the Olympic events, are nearly always learned late and hard, in the U.S. after playing baseball and football for a while. Speed does come naturally to the beautiful racehorses of the running track, like Florence Griffith Joyner, though at the world-class level science kicks in and a specialized knowledge is required. Hobbled running backs reach uncertainly for their hamstrings in panic, but sprinters know every muscle according to its isolated throb, like a subtle note of music distinguishable from all the others by some slight tone, especially now that the concert is near.

Because of the rigidly democratic procedure America employs for selecting its team, in this country the Olympic mountain has two peaks, and many of the athletes are in the process of trying to hold their bodies together after the recent trials for the second climb in September. The strain of it is as heavy as the oofing and puffing of Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the regal heptathlete who has transcended her event. Almost nobody knows what in the world a heptathlete does, but almost everyone knows she is the best in the world at doing it.