Daydreams on the Closing Night

By George Plimpton

A spectator aims for Seoul--maybe

Our man in the stands took his appointed seat for the closing night of the Games, but daydreamed about where he might have been.

The last marathon runner we watched emerge from the tunnel into the Coliseum was a Haitian with a lovely, euphonious name, Dieudonne Lamothe. He ran his last lap stolidly, engulfed by applause, and when he crossed the finish line he was the 78th runner to do so. The orange Halloween-hat traffic cones used to guide Lamothe and his swifter brethren onto the track from the tunnel were picked up; the tunnel was blocked off so that such scheduled rituals as the awarding of the final medals, the reintroduction of the athletes, the arrival of a spaceship, the performance of 200 break dancers, Lionel Richie, the fireworks and so forth, could begin.

But the original marathon field had consisted of 107 runners. What had happened to the rest of the contestants? Had they all dropped out, or were a number of them milling around outside the tunnel on Vermont Avenue trying to get in? Or even more poignant--were these exhausted men simply trying to persuade a gate attendant to let them down into the infield so they could watch the festivities with their fellow athletes? The gate attendant would be firm. "Got to have a ticket."

My seat neighbor said, "You look preoccupied."

I told her about the marathoners I felt were missing out on the celebration. "Down there is such a privileged place to be," I said. The athletes were carousing on the running track. An Australian girl wearing a knapsack was being tossed in a huge Australian flag.

"You'd like to be with them?" she asked. "I envy them. Don't you?" "Yes," she said. "I've always wanted to be a javelin thrower."

I suspect we were not alone in wondering wistfully if there was not perhaps one Olympic event (after all there are 220 of them) perfectly suited to our athletic abilities. It was only a question of knowing--that if she had picked up a javelin, say, just by chance, and thrown it, through some perfect and startling alchemic convulsion of muscles the thing would have sailed a quarter of a mile. Astonished observers in Central Park--the kind of place one would find a javelin or two lying around untended--would ask to see it done again. Why not? After a few more titanic tosses, just to show a fluke was not involved, a phone call to a proper authority, a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee, would have been made.

"Ahem, I've just discovered the most extraordinary thing about myself." So now she would be sitting down there next to Steve Lundquist, the white-blond gold-medalist swimmer.

Actually, unlike others who share this absurd Walter Mitty daydream, I had done something about it. A month before the Games I had gone to the Olympic Training Center under the shadow of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs to be tested in the Sports Physiology laboratories there to see if by chance there was a particular Olympic event for which I was a perfect physical specimen to suit up.

A number of teams were in training at the center when I arrived. I had looked at them speculatively--judo (no chance there--too specialized), boxing (no, wrong-shaped nose), race walkers (not dignified enough on the move), water polo players, their nose clips dangling from their necks (a possibility?) and bicyclists.

The bicycling caught my interest for a moment. In New York City I ride through town on a three-speed Peugeot with a wicker basket in front, but then I was shown the bowl-like velodrome where the bicyclists shoot up the wall and assume a sharp angle to the side that I can only associate with a bicycle that is in the process of falling down.

I would have to rely on my testers. These were Dr. Jackie Puhl, a young, vibrant woman with a Ph.D. in exercise physiology from Kent State, who rides a bicycle ten miles every day to her job at the center, and Bob Hintermeister, a lean sprinter type who earned his master's degree in physical education at the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Puhl said, "A lot of what we can offer from here is a kind of support system for your coach so he can get a theoretical optimization of your athletic abilities."

"I don't have a coach," I said. "Oh."

After a pause, I said, "Maybe I can get a coach after you tell me what it is I can do best."

I spent the rest of the day moving from one instrument to the next. I sat down and pulled at the sawed-offoars of a Concept II Rowing Ergometer. I submitted myself to a Biokinetic Pacer Bench Unit. I performed on a Quinton 18-72 Treadmill, breathing hard into a hoselike attachment called a Gould Programmable Electric Ergometer. At each station, computer screens glowed with figures; print-outs emerged, many with finely etched graphs. I was strapped into the Cybex II Isokinetic Dynamometer to measure the strength of my arms and legs. The Cybex (I was told) can show if an athlete has a muscle imbalance--whether the right leg is stronger than the left, in which case the balance can be redressed with the proper exercises. "This will tell if I tilt when I walk," I said. "Possibly," Bob Hintermeister said.

The first sign of excitement came with a test called the fev 1.0, which measures how much air can be forcefully blown out in one second. Fev 1.0 stands for Forced Expiratory Volume at one second.

"It is really a very sharp curve here," Hintermeister said, looking at the graph. "It's almost as if we ... you blew up balloons for a living." He looked at me questioningly. "Well," I said, "I blow up the usual four or five a year. Birthday parties. I'm not much of an expert. I can tell you that the cheaper the balloon the more difficult it is to inflate. The really cheap ones tend to escape the lips and flail around the room. Right?"

One test I missed I wish I hadn't: having some muscle removed to see whether I was a slow or fast twitcher.

The instrument that does this is a cylinder about the size of a large fountain pen. It contains a guillotine-like contraption that, when the needle is inserted under the skin, snips off a piece of muscle so its fibers can be inspected through a microscope. The procedure leaves a small scar, perhaps a centimeter in length, and what is learned in return is whether one has a high percentage of fast-twitch muscle fibers, which means the muscular makeup is suitable for anaerobic activities such as weight lifting and the 100-yd. dash, where gulps of oxygen are not at a premium, or slow-twitch, which suggests one would be better off in aerobic activities, in which lungs full of oxygen are required, such as kayaking or running a marathon.

I wish I had taken the test if only for the scar. A network of scars is always worth having for conversational gambits. ("Got this little one here, can you see it? Trying out for the Olympics.") At the end of the day Jackie Puhl collected the print-outs and the data sheets and we gathered around a conference table. "Have any patterns emerged?" I asked. "There are," Dr. Puhl was saying "two interesting oddities about your charts." My heart jumped.

"First of all, what is very unusual is that your hamstrings--that is to say, the muscles in the backs of your thighs--are far more powerful than the quadricep muscles in the front, those four muscular bands we call the quads. Very unusual."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that you can kick backward more powerfully than you can kick forward."

"Oh."

"Then your fev 1.0 test," Dr. Puhl went on, "shows you're very adept at expelling air swiftly. Snorting."

"So I understand from Bob," I said.

"But what is all this good for? Does an Olympic event come to mind?"

"This backward kicking motion might come in handy riding a horse," Dr. Puhl said. "Spurring him on." I was going to say that I had not been on a horse since 1975 when Bob Hintermeister said, "It's too bad football isn't on the Olympic agenda. You could kick field goals backward."

Dr. Puhl shuffled her papers and continued. "As for being able to blow out sharply, I just don't know. With swimming, of course, it's helpful to be able to exhale abruptly, but the rest of the tests don't suggest the water's your medium.

I'm quite at a loss, frankly."

A friend of mine in New York was ingenious enough to offer an activity that smartly combined both properties. "That combination of kicking backward, pawing at the ground," he said, "and snorting sharply, brings only one thing to mind.

And that's the bullfight." He paused.

"That's where you belong, and it's not the matador I have in mind."

Below, the break dancers were performing in the climactic moments of the closing ceremonies. The athletes were seated on the grass watching them.

"Did you know I was tested at the Colorado Training Center to be in the Olympics?"I asked my neighbor. "They were trying to find me a sport so I could be down there lolling about listening to Lionel Richie."

"What did they decide you were qualified to be?" she asked. The fireworks began going off above. "A bull," I said. She looked at me sharply. "That must be quite a testing facility they have out there."

"I'm going back there a couple of months before the Games start in Seoul in 1988. Perhaps they'll find out something ... more applicable."

"I'm coming too. Do women pole vault in the Olympics?" she asked, looking down at the field. "I mean I ought to know before they tell me I'm very good at it." --By George Plimpton