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Fun and games with athletes
SYDNEY -- With beeps and buzzers going on all around me, I bid you g'day from the game room at the Athletes Village in Sydney. It is a couch potato's paradise filled by people who are anything but. This is roughly the geographic center of the village, where athletes mingle and engage in more relaxed -- and usually friendlier -- competition than what they'll face in the next few weeks. There are 60 pinball machines, 40 video games, four air-hockey boards, four foosball tables, a dozen pool tables and every conceivable means of vicarious stress relief an athlete could want before battle. All of it free. Let's take a tour. Five athletes with Turkish jerseys -- Turkiye in their alphabet -- surround a teammate who has a penetrating understanding of American football. On the video screen in front of him, his Dolphins are fighting the good fight against the machine's Cowboys. I can't make out his ID tag, but he clearly understands the game, punctuating each play with description, applause and occasional invective, to his teammates' amusement. "Ah!" he yells as a play appears to go horribly wrong. It is a complex play, not your father's buzzing electric football in which players take off in random directions before keeling over. Translating the gyrations of frustration, I'm guessing that with sweeping back-and-forth arm motions and sharp taps of the screen, the gentleman is explaining to his teammates why the defensive team must always pursue a lateral. The Buffalo Bills' special teams will be along shortly for a primer. U.S. canoeist Cliff Meidl has just dismounted from a moving jet ski and is shaking his head in defeat. "Real water isn't this hard," Meidl says as he watches several teammates enjoying mixed success. "I think I like the snowboard one the best." So he drags them off to the simulated snowboard. Meidl's teammates, Rebecca and Eric Giddens, are ruining marital bliss at a foosball table. Rebecca is twice thwarted, once by an errant kick and again by her husband's sneaky table tilt. "Hey, no fair," she protests. "Sorry," he says, before tilting again. The sprint and whitewater athletes arrived two weeks earlier, they tell me, and are staying at a separate facility in Penrith, a Sydney suburb. "We just wanted to check this out," Eric says. "We'll move back in here after we're done." "To take in the village atmosphere?" I ask, watching their eyes widen. As a married couple, they'll have to pull some room switches with teammates since males and females are officially segregated. By the end of the Games, single athletes have been known to break the rules, too. For now, Rebecca is trying to drag Eric to a pool table. "I tried air hockey and I'm terrible," she says. "He doesn't want to play pool." This negotiation could take a while. U.S. freestyle swimmer Anthony Ervin has started firing at one of the shooting stations, then a second, then a third. For a good 30 minutes he is alternately hitting bull's-eye targets, then flying fire-breathing critters of some sort, then human-like figures in cowboy hats who are shooting back at him. One can only surmise that in his mind's eye he has Gary Hall Jr. and Alexander Popov in his sights. U.S. swimmer Kaitlin Sandeno has her arms raised aloft after a successful ski run on the swinging "Alpine Racer." Her teammate, Ian Crocker, is clapping behind her. To Sandeno's right, Ukrainian Vladislav Tereschenko is having a miserable run: off a cliff, against a fir tree, skis over head, over a fence and into an upstairs window of a ski shack. Seconds later he is remarkably unscathed and back on the course again, tumbling into the spectators. Tereschenko is a kayaker by trade, and he should stick to his day job. In the middle of the floor, three of four air-hockey tables have OUT OF ORDER signs on them. Hockey, after all, is a contact sport, even if most of the Canadian delegation hasn't yet arrived. As I watch, an errant shot from Saudi Arabia's Jamal Al Saffar skids off a table and pelts Yugoslavian swimmer Milorad Cavic on the leg. Undeterred, Cavic continues to shoot moving targets. Seconds after the puck-pelting, his high score has earned him a free game. Now that's grace under fire. Cuba's Manuel Mantilla has his back to the wall and, to the amazement of his 12 cheering countrymen, he has managed to weave his car out of traffic. "Bueno, si, Manuel," shouts Alexis Rubalcaba, the team's super heavyweight boxer whose affirmations can be heard way over by the Baywatch pinball machine. I am pulled aside by Congo swimmer Marien Ngouabi, who has offered the challenge of an air-hockey clash. This I can handle. We're not talking split times here; rather, a few pedestrian flicks of the wrist that are much more my speed than, say, pole vaulting. Life is good at first. I soar to a 4-0 lead. Then I fold. "So sorry," Marien says after thrashing me for six of the next seven goals. "Maybe I am lucky today." As a Venezuelan lady approaches him for the honor of the next game, I wish Marien similar good luck when he hits the pool later this month. Then I watch the universal language of ... air hockey spread the ideals of Olympic multiculturalism before my eyes. SI writer-reporter Brian Cazeneuve, the magazine's Olympics expert, is already in Australia gearing up for the Games. Check back daily to follow his behind-the-scenes reports.
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