Athletics

Caster Semenya started to run almost as soon as she could walk. She played soccer with the boys in her rural village. At school races, she'd lap the other girls -- sometimes twice or more. Even then, according to friends quoted by South African news reports, girls teased her about looking like a boy. Semenya shrugged it off and kept on running. But after she exploded onto the athletic stage Wednesday in the World Championships in Berlin, beating her nearest rival in the women's 800-meter race by a whopping 2.45 seconds, the question was back: Is she really a she?

The baseball ground rules are different in Cambodia. A ball hit off the water buffaloes grazing in the outfield is in play, but a ball lost in the adjoining rice paddy is not. And timeout must be called whenever a motorcycle approaches on the dirt road that cuts through the outfield. "You can't put it in perspective with words," said Jim Small, managing director for Major League Baseball's operations in Asia. "You just need to see it." But even then you can't always believe what you're seeing.

I was 12 the first time I read W.C. Heinz. I've never forgotten the story: "The Rocky Road of Pistol Pete." It was a bittersweet look at Pete Reiser, undone by his own fearlessness when he was the Brooklyn Dodgers' golden child and marooned years later as a bush league manager with a bad heart and a rattletrap Chevy. You wouldn't think a kid plowing through True magazine's 1957 Baseball Annual would care, but I did. And even today what Bill Heinz wrote still gets me in the heart and the gut.

If you can hit, drive or pedal better than anyone else, you've probably been invited to the White House and had your photo taken with President Bush. To football players, race-car drivers and Lance Armstrong, add this: anglers. On Tuesday, Bush's Oval Office champions were two bass-fishing tournament winners. With Alton Jones, who won $500,000, on one side and Judy Wong, who won $60,000, on the other, the president sought the right words to sum up their achievements.

The tallest player on the women's national basketball squad is 5 feet 7 inches. She and her teammates cannot practice in the nation's capital because of poor security. And in northern Kurdistan, where they are now based, they practice outdoors, often in frigid temperatures.

The battle between high-tech swimsuit manufacturers TYR and Speedo has escalated in a significant way, moving from the pool deck to the legal arena. Huntington Beach's TYR Sport Inc. upped the stakes by filing suit on Monday in federal court against Warnaco Swimwear Inc., parent company of Speedo and producer of the news-making LZR Racer swimsuit. TYR did not specify the damages it was seeking but did estimate that the long-term loss to the value of its brand could reach $500,000.

Giovanni Lanaro was born in Los Angeles, grew up in La Puente, attended Cal State Fullerton, and coaches and trains at Mt. San Antonio College. Yet, when the torch is lighted during opening ceremonies this summer at the Beijing Olympics, the world's sixth-ranked pole vaulter will be with Mexico, not the United States. "I will always compete for Mexico," said Lanaro, whose mother was born there. "I will never compete for any other country."

Jim Scherr isn't conceding anything. The chief executive of the U.S. Olympic Committee is merely being realistic in saying China probably will win the most medals at the Beijing Games That's not supposed to matter. The idea of the Olympics is to unite people in the spirit of fair play, but the medal standings are inevitably twisted into validation of political systems. China had the fourth-highest medal total at Atlanta in 1996, third-best behind the U.S.

The International Olympic Committee agreed Tuesday to allow Iraq to participate in the Beijing Games, reversing itself after Baghdad pledged to ensure the independence of its national Olympics panel. The decision followed last-minute talks between Iraqi officials and the IOC before today's deadline to submit competitors' names for track and field events. The Olympics begin Aug. 8. Iraq is expected to send two athletes to Beijing to compete in track and field.

ESPN, looking beyond the middle-aged male sports fan, will unveil a new digital strategy Wednesday aimed at the Dogtown crowd. The move seeks to establish online what the Walt Disney Co.-owned cable channel did more than a decade ago in television when it created the X Games, a twice-yearly competition of assorted nonteam, untraditional sports events catering to extreme sports enthusiasts.