United States Athletic Teams

Floyd Mayweather's hand was raised. He celebrated, the Alexander Memorial Coliseum crowd roared, logic prevailed. And then everything swerved into Olympic boxing bizarro land, a mysterious place full of futile protests, glitchy computers, dark hints of intrigue and blatant incompetence. We have been here before. Previous visitors to this now-familiar destination include Roy Jones Jr. in the 1988 Seoul Games and Eric Griffin in the 1992 Barcelona Games.

The U.S. runner on the penultimate leg in the final of the men's 400-meter relay tonight in Centennial Olympic Stadium will round the final curve and hand off to . . . Muhammad Ali. From hints dropped here Friday night, it could happen. We are being told that the anchorman for the heavily favored U.S. team could be an athlete who used to be the greatest, would like nothing more than to win one more gold medal and, leadoff man Jon Drummond said, will be a big surprise.

The U.S. baseball team's burnished bronze medals are going to outshine any tarnished gold professionals win in the next Olympics, U.S. Coach Skip Bertman insisted Friday after the United States beat Nicaragua, 10-3, for a disappointing third-place finish.

Michael Johnson probably could anchor the U.S. 1,600-meter relay team to an Olympic gold medal tonight on one leg. But he won't try. Johnson, who said that he felt a twinge in his right hamstring about five meters from the finish line in his world-record 200 meters Thursday night, withdrew from the relay team Friday morning. "I have a little tightness in the lower right hamstring," he said. "There are a lot of guys capable of running, and I don't want to hurt the chances for a gold medal."

Break out the hardwood bats, Jacque Jones is ready. The people who doubt him shortly will have no more excuses. Already Jones has won acclaim in college as the center fielder and a top hitter on USC's Pacific-10 Conference championship team. Then he starred for the U.S. baseball team, leading the bronze-medal-winning Americans in almost every offensive category in the Olympics. But something he can't change still plagues him. In nine games during the Olympics, Jones batted .

Lindsay Davenport's weight-loss program suffered a setback here Friday. Davenport spent an hour and 35 minutes on Center Court at the Stone Mountain Tennis Center in the midday Georgia humidity, running down Arantxa Sanchez Vicario's forehands, and actually gained a pound. And it will stay there until Davenport finally decides to remove the green ribbon from around her neck and stash the Olympic gold medal someplace for safe keeping. Assuming she ever does.

Sixty years have trickled by but Frank Lubin remembers it all as if it happened 60 days ago. Even now, at age 86, he recalls details, names, circumstances. Then again, what athlete could forget taking part in the Olympic Games? For Lubin, who has lived in Glendale for nearly four decades, that opportunity came in 1936 in Berlin, site of the first Olympic basketball tournament. "I had never been out of California and traveling to Berlin was an exciting time," Lubin said.

Cyclist Rebecca Twigg, a three-time Olympian and two-time medalist who had one event remaining in what might have been her final Olympics, has left the U.S. team and gone home, apparently because of a conflict with U.S. Coach Chris Carmichael. "Everybody here at cycling is blown away," said Linda Brenneman, who would have competed alongside Twigg in the individual time trial Saturday. "The reaction we're getting from everybody is, 'I can't believe she did that, regardless of the reasons.'

Dan O'Brien is the leader in the clubhouse, but that's where the comparison ends. After all, nobody ever pretended that the leader after Thursday's round at the Lovely Willow Country Club was trying to become the world's greatest athlete. This is the decathlon, and after Wednesday's first half at Olympic Stadium here, O'Brien is nicely atop the leaderboard. This is also an American tradition, and all the apple pie is one day away from the eating for this resident of Moscow.

A Hungarian track athlete sits in a salon chair, an Olympic torch half shaved into his hair. A Russian distance runner needs seven pins to pick up a 10th-frame spare to break 60 in a game of bowling. Nyet! Gutter ball. A Canadian rower signs on to the Internet to correspond with his friends back in Nova Scotia--and check on what the local sportswriters are saying about his performance. A judoist from the Czech Republic frets over the selection of Olympic pins in a makeshift department store.