GREENBURGH, N.Y., Oct. 4 - Stephon Marbury came home from Athens last month carrying a heavy load, and it was not the uncomfortable weight of an Olympic bronze medal.
Yet of the 64 Britons who have bowed their heads and felt the delicious weight of an Olympic ribbon on their necks here 28 are attending their first Games and 33 have picked up their first medal.
Three days in, the group has already created a program that uses the height and weight of each Olympic competitor to work out their body mass index and see what proportion are technically underweight, overweight and obese.
Did you sense that they would eventually support the weight of 22 Olympic medals?
Classes last one hour and combine elements of Olympic weight lifting, calisthenics and gymnastics.
The whole sport of Olympic weight lifting in the United States is scruffy: no money, low participation; it's our Jamaican bobsled team.
The exercises that draw all this interest are a mixture of old-fashioned physical culture chin-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, and sprints, all with triculture chin-upstions—and the clean, press, and jerk movements of Olympic weight lifting that, as practiced by potbellied Russians in the seventies, circandThe Wide World of sprints" hallfascinated me.
With a vast weight room rimmed with portraits of Olympic medal winners (including Ms. Bleiler), the 85,000-square-foot facility also has an area with skateboard ramps, trampolines and a landing pit filled with foam cubes for practicing aerial maneuvers.
This time, it will be up to Freeman, and if she can do it amid the din, she knows she will feel a great deal more emotion than she felt after defending her world title last year and slumping wearily to the track without bothering with a victory lap as if already feeling the weight of a nation's Olympic expectations.
