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L i o n Heart

Fourteen Jews go for Olympic gold as part of Team USA.

TOM SINGER

Special to the Jewish News

he Olympics are not — or definitely shouldn't be _
about Dream Teams, professional athletes on gold-
prospecting sabbaticals or boxers entering the ring hop-
ing to impress promoters into offering multi-million
dollar purses.
The Olympics are about people who sacrifice to be there, peo-
ple who need to be there to sate personal demons, people for
whom just being there is enough glory. They are about:
• Lenny Krayzelburg, who fled stifling Odessa 11 years ago to
dive into the American melting pot and a pool, balancing his
athletic training with his responsibilities to an over-worked fami-
ly.
• Nicole Freedman, who for years bunked in a broken-down
van, postponing life's natural cycles for the one she pedals 350
miles a week. And about Cliff Bayer (the University of
• Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business) and Tamir Bloom
(Mt. Sinai Medical College), who dropped out for a year to corn-

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2000

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mit themselves to foiling America's blighted reputation in an
ancient sport and pursue fencing glory.
• Joanne Zeiger, a 30-year-old asthmatic with two degrees and
a third on hold, who simply refuses to fall short of her own
mountain-top and devotes herself to arguably the most arduous
of all athletic events, the triathlon.
The contingent of American Jewish athletes in Sydney for the
2000 Olympic Games is minute, but spirited. As one of them,
road racing biker Nicole Freedman, said upon hearing Team
USA includes only 14 Jews, "That's remarkable. You're talking
out of a thousand athletes."
The Jewish-American "Fabulous 14" will try to write new
chapters in the decidedly thin volume of Jewish Olympic success
stories. The peak and the nadir converged in 1972 Munich, the
Olympics of Mark Spitz and of terror, an unequalled harvest of
seven gold medals and the unspeakable horror of 11 deaths.
It took a while after that for Israel and many American Jews
to rekindle an Olympic flame, just as it originally took Jewish
people a long time to warm up to the Olympic concept itself.
The resistance was historic and engrained — after all, a competi-
tion inspired by the perch of multiple Greek gods, Mount

140