Olympic Games 1992

Emerging from the chaos at the start of the Olympic marathon, Polin Belisle of Burbank sprinted to the front of the pack, running shoulder to shoulder with some of the world's best distance runners for nearly a mile. An improbable achievement for Belisle, it all seemed too good to be true. It was. Belisle was not supposed to be in the marathon. He wasn't even supposed to be in the Olympics.

Were it not for a pair of tender hamstrings, Quincy Watts might never have won gold medals in the 400 meters and 1,600 relay in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. Watts, a 1988 graduate of Taft High, broke the Olympic record twice in the 400 and ran the second leg on a world-record-setting relay team in Barcelona. But it's doubtful he would have become a quarter-miler had he not sustained a series of hamstring injuries from 1988-90. A three-time state champion in high school, Watts was the No.

The fastest 50-meter freestyle swimmers in the world last year were Americans Matt Biondi, Tom Jager and Steve Crocker. But only two of them will advance from the Olympic trials, March 1-6 in Indianapolis, to the Olympic Games, starting July 25 in Barcelona, Spain. In response to U.S. swimming dominance, FINA, the world governing body of the sport, decreased the number of entrants allowed each country from three per event to two in 1980. Other international meets followed suit.

You won't find his likeness on any cereal boxes and he isn't currently appearing in any athletic shoe commercials on television, yet Quincy Watts was The Man in the 400-meter dash before the reign of Michael Johnson. Johnson, who became the first man to win the 200 and 400 in the same Olympic Games in Atlanta last summer, has dominated the 400 so thoroughly in recent years that it's easy to forget that Taft High graduate Watts won the 1992 Olympic title in Barcelona.

Sunglass maker Ray-Ban was spending big bucks on advertising during the Olympics, but it was Irvine-based Oakley sunglasses that captured the best spots. Several athletes, including decathlon bronze-medalist Dave Johnson, wore Oakley's glasses during their television appearances. "Dave Johnson we've been working with a couple of years, but a lot of the rest were surprises," said Jim Jannard, advertising director for Oakley.

At 28, Kirk Kilgour was one of the best volleyball players in the world. Blond-haired, blue-eyed and muscular, the Van Nuys resident had led UCLA to two national championships in the 1970s and was an avid surfer, skier and basketball player. In 1976, he earned a position on the U.S. Olympic volleyball team. But six months before the Games began in Montreal, Kilgour took an ill-fated leap off a springboard while coaching an Italian volleyball team in Rome. When he landed, he snapped his neck.

The 1992 Olympic basketball team is perhaps the best ever, but it was only the second best team on the court Wednesday. The developmental squad made up of top college players defeated the Olympic team in a 20-minute scrimmage. No one was disclosing the final score, but the collegians won by eight points. "We got killed today," Michael Jordan said. "They beat us and they played well. We're so out of sync and so unsure about things that we feel comfortable with in normal situations.

If one of the reasons the U.S. men's volleyball players shaved their heads was to make the International Volleyball Federation look bad, the joke was on them. The only people who looked really bad Tuesday were the players. "Silly" was how one of their Canadian opponents described them. Even the U.S. players confessed that they couldn't look at each other without giggling. If another reason they shaved their heads was to motivate themselves to rise above adversity, they almost failed there, too.

They came to see a dream but they got the dark side of the force, too. Proving he can embarrass himself in any context, Charles Barkley put on a clinic in bad manners, highlighted by a technical foul for elbowing an Angola player, causing fans in the Palau d'Esports to whistle in derision. That barely slowed Barkley, who scored a game-high 24 points, or the Dream Team, which crunched Angola, 116-48, Sunday in its Olympic debut. However, it did spark a one-sided post-game debate.

The five young men from Honolulu huddled on a Spanish beach two weeks ago, not so much to celebrate the end of the Barcelona Olympics as to reaffirm their lifelong friendship. Brad Yim, Wyatt Jones, Nalu Kukea, Werner Girndt and Eric Chun had spent little time together in recent years because they were following their varied interests. Yim, 21, attended USC for a year before transferring to the University of San Diego, where he and Girndt majored in business and played rugby.

Danny Everett has run away with the first prize again. The 1988 and 1992 Olympic gold medalist took top honors in the Seoul and Barcelona summer games for the 1,600-meter relay race and the bronze medal in the 400-meter race. But these days, Everett has hung up his medals and athletic shoes momentarily, exchanging them for a chef's hat and trays of golden-brown gingerbread. "I've been cooking all of my life," said the 30-year-old Calabasas resident.

MEDAL COUNT 1992* *--* Country Gold Silver Bronze RUSSIA 45 38 28 UNITED STATES 37 34 37 GERMANY 33 21 28 CHINA 16 22 16 SPAIN 14 7 2 *--* * Barcelona

Another team, another dream, another All-American marketing scheme. . . . Those star-spangled, slam-dunking, scene-stealing, Angolan-elbowing NBA stars are back, billed as Dream Team III, for what that's worth. Since the original Dream Team took over the Barcelona Olympics, it has been Dream this and Dream that. O.J. Simpson's lawyers were called the Dream Team.

"Nervous?" the coach wondered. "No," the diver said. Once, maybe. Once, standing on the three-meter springboard with all his hopes tucked in a pending reverse 3 1/2 somersault, Mark Lenzi might have freaked. But not this time. Not in Indianapolis, on this Friday night, June 21, on this do-or-die last dive at the U.S. Olympic trials. Not after where he had been. Not after winning gold in 1992 at Barcelona and sitting next to Jay Leno one week, then waiting for the phone to ring the next.

Doug Kimbell of Orange, the most veteran player on the U.S. national water polo team, has announced his retirement. Knee problems forced him to quit, according to Bruce Wigo, executive director of U.S. Water Polo. Kimbell, 34, played on U.S. Olympic teams in 1988 and 1992. More recently, he helped the U.S. team win the Pan American Games championship in April. He played on the national team for the first time in 1980, not long after graduating from Villa Park High.

What was the biggest sports story of 1992? Was it the Washington Redskins beating the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl? Or was it the endless debate about who was the best team in collegiate football--the University of Washington or Miami? How about the Olympics and the individual achievements of American athletes? Whichever one you pick, it seems you are bound to find at least one athlete from East, Central or South Los Angeles who participated.

"C ommitment. "I make a commitment that no other wrestler does. There are probably a few wrestlers out there who think they make a commitment. But I really make a commitment. "Anything that gets in my way, I pretty much eliminate. I don't have too many close friends. I don't have too many close relationships. I just can't afford to have them to go where I want to go, to do what I want to do. I really focus on myself. I really figure out and find a way how I can win, how I can beat everybody.

Twenty-one years after it was expelled from Olympic competition for its racially discriminatory policy of apartheid, South Africa won readmission from the International Olympic Committee here Tuesday, opening the door for South African athletes to participate in the 1992 Olympic Games. The historic decision, based largely on the South African Parliament's repeal of key apartheid statutes in June, is expected to give a big boost to the reform movement of South African President Frederik W.

It's a good thing that Lothar Osiander likes waiting on tables at Graziano's in San Francisco, because he might need to do it full time in the future. He took time off to coach the U.S. Olympic soccer team in 1988 and 1992, and although his record was a respectable (for the United States, not Italy or Argentina) 1-2-3, he did not receive good reviews for his team's performance last summer in Spain.

Emerging from the chaos at the start of the Olympic marathon, Polin Belisle of Burbank sprinted to the front of the pack, running shoulder to shoulder with some of the world's best distance runners for nearly a mile. An improbable achievement for Belisle, it all seemed too good to be true. It was. Belisle was not supposed to be in the marathon. He wasn't even supposed to be in the Olympics.