Olympics: Colliding Myths After a Dozen Years

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At the other end of the comfort scale from Lisovskaya is Mario Martinez. He already has an Olympic medal -- the silver for super heavyweight lifting in 1984; he captured three gold medals at the 1987 Pan Am Games and placed tenth in the 1987 world championships. But Martinez gets no state subsidy, no help from a national council for his sport to pay for his San Francisco apartment. With a wife and one-year-old daughter to support -- not to mention a special diet to maintain his 318 lbs. of muscle -- Martinez, 31, cannot exercise six or seven hours a day like his Soviet rivals. He has a 40-hr.-a-week job. "I work at Budget Rent a Car," he explains, "parking autos, getting them for customers, taking them to the car wash, hanging the keys up. Then I train three or four days a week from 6 to 9 p.m. I am always sore." Martinez's coach Jim Schmitz also coaches the U.S. team. To thrive, he says, it needs Soviet-style recruitment and subsidies. "We lose most weight lifters to football scholarships."

Joe Story's name sounds like a joke, and it has given rise to a few: at 5 ft. 7 in., he is known as a short story, and at 36, he is an old story. Within the arcane world of team handball, where he was the U.S. hero at the 1987 Pan Am Games, he is a big story. A member of the squad since 1977, he played at the 1984 Olympics, when the team finished ninth, and is captain of the contingent going to Seoul. His sacrifices to keep playing would be almost incomprehensible to the average baby boomer. He lives, along with up to 600 other athletes, in U.S. Olympic Committee dorms in Colorado Springs, where he cannot cook or bring liquor into the room, and his bathroom and phone are down the hall. He must meet an 11 p.m. curfew and take a mandatory 90-min. nap at noon. Although the sport is big enough in Europe that club players can earn in excess of $50,000 a year, Story survives on $4,000 from donations and a part- time job with the U.S.O.C. ticket office, plus free room and board.

Story is far from alone. Robert Nieman, 40, is a former world champion in pentathlon, the sport that combines running, swimming, shooting, fencing and horseback riding. Jobless while training, he relies on "the fact that my wife has a very good job." Adds Nieman: "McDonald's gave us some free hamburgers. That's big time in pentathlon."

Yet if the Soviet care and feeding of athletes at times looks enviable, it is far from perfect. For one thing, it can be ruthless. After Kayaker Nikolai Oseledetz shared victory in the four-man team, 10,000-meter event at the 1986 world championships, he asked for a Moscow apartment and was told he would get one. After he was cut from the national team the next year, he was brusquely informed no more flats were available and continued to reside, apart from his wife of five years and son, in a drab room he shares with another kayaker. That separation is not uncommon, even for two-athlete couples: training is so intense that connubiality is discouraged. Officially an army officer assigned to submarine duty, Oseledetz carries an I.D. card that says his task is "to defend the honor of the Central Army Sports Club." The army sponsors one of the two biggest sports clubs; the other, Dinamo, is sponsored by the secret police.