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Show by Jim Murray Murray om Sprt : 1 Thursday. March 27, 1980 Page 13 Leilani Soares To Race or Not to Race By Richard Bamum-Keece She turned 14 last June and now the deal is coming down. Her sister, Elana, decided it was a bit much. And now Lelani Soares is making the decision. "I'm sort of on the verge of deciding now," she said, twisting a strand of chestnut-brown chestnut-brown hair in her left hand as she talked. "I've put all the thought I can into it and I'm at the last point to decide whether to do it or not." Her coach, Bob Marsh, said she has "awesome" talent. "It's up to her pretty much now," he said one day on the hill as Soares slashed down a giant slalom course. She was a bit disappointed with her finish in the Nationals for 14-15-16-year-olds held recently at Stratton Mt., Vt. On two different days she finished fourth and fifth in slalom and giant slalom among the best ski racers in her age bracket in the United States. Soares says she was disappointed but she doesn't have a right to be. She admitted ad-mitted she's lazy and she has no love for training. In fact, she admitted that whenever possible she sort of slides out of the more rigorous demands deman-ds of physical training. Is she afraid of work? "That's what holds me away," she said. "I find it really difficult. I haven't done it for long periods of time and when I did it, it wasn't much fun at all." It is not that Lelani Soares is a wimp. Even though she doesn't have the capacity for training of someone like Iloxanne Toly, who now cruises the World Cup circuit, cir-cuit, Lelani still knows intimately in-timately the hard breathing and full-out effort required of ski racing. "I just usually get more out of ski racing than I put into it and that's what scares me," Soares explained. "Mostly because it's going to start to catch up with me really fast." In fact, her mother said it's starting to catch up with her now. Usually a honor roll student, she's taken an academic nosedive in the past few months because of the hectic schedule of ski racing. "It would be different, dif-ferent, I suppose, if we had a firm schedule but it seems like she's always just making the quota," said Kathy Soares. Lelani said her results "still sort of surprise me because I don't put out a full effort." So now she is deciding if she wants to get into ski racing more heavily or get out of it altogether. That's the decision she now faces. It comes in the nature of a dilemma: to become as good as she can become she is going to have to forego some things that other girls her age savour. "Things like sleeping in late," she laughed through the gravely voice she has recently acquired in the cold, wet Vermont air. But it's more than sleeping late. It's the double-bind for highly competitive athletes: Training requires a full-time effort and a kind of narrow vision which steals away from the more languid pursuits pur-suits of the teenage years. This comes especially hard if you happen, through no fault of you own, to look like a starlet. It may be the preferable existential burden, bur-den, but, nonetheless, being pretty can be a pain. "I don't know if Lelani would want me to tell you this," her mother intoned as we discussed her daughter. "She has come up to me and said maybe if she wasn't pretty she wouldn't have to choose. She looks at her sister who is a cheerleader and she thinks about that and Lelani knows she doesn't have as many close friends because she doesn't spend that much time here during the winter." Lelani and her older sister Elana started skiing when they were five and six years old. They started ski racing at eight and nine. Kathy Soares said she was at first reluctant to let them race. "I thought the racers had such terrible attitudes. They were such smart asses and then the girls were often crying and being upset and that bothered me," she said. PROSPECTOR ATHLETIC CLUB 649-6670 4 Racquetball Courts 75 ft. enclosed lap pool Weight Room Gymnasium Jacuzzi Steam Room Saunas Dynavit (computerized exercycle) New classes begin Jan. 7, 1980. Classes are FREE to all members. Memberships still available: Single Couple Family Full Facility $300 $350 $400 Duesmonth $35 $55 $65 Fitness only $150 $200 $275 Duesmonth $25 $40 $50 Full Facility memberships include all racquetball & tennis court time. if v ' ' V' i A: -, ; II ' ' If ;' ' The two sisters joined a program run by Bruce Morse, who promised a low-key non-commercial introduction introduc-tion to ski racing. Both girls thrived. Later, Elana, who had often successfully battled bat-tled her sister for the competitive com-petitive edge, decided to spend more time in school, getting involved in such extracurricular ex-tracurricular pursuits as being a Park City High School cheerleader. "This year has been a lot more trouble in school for Lelani than ever before," Kathy Soares explained. "She isn't self-disciplined enough to grab an hour or two of study while she's traveling to races. And I doubt if I could discipline myself that much as a 14-year-old either. So now the decision is whether she wants to go to a ski academy or not." In Sun Valley, the local racers who go on to prominence, racers like Pete Patterson, Christin Cooper and Susie Patterson, did not go away to an academy. They got deals. The academic workload was cut and they went ski racing, concentrating on ski racing only. Cooper dropped out of high school before graduating and hasn't returned retur-ned since. The Sun Valley program isn't available in Park City because of many factors, among which is a long tradition of ski racing excellence ex-cellence fostered by the Sun Valley Ski Educational Foundation. The foundation is a non-profit tax exempt corporation organized to raise money and provide support to ski racers. The same type of foundation foun-dation runs the Stratton Mt. Academy where increased numbers of top-ranked amateur racers are attending atten-ding school. Still, Roxanne Toly didn't go away to an academy. But 14-year-old Lisa Wilcox does. She's the 14-year-old who most impressed Soares at the Nationals. "Lisa is probably the best in the country. It was the first time I saw her perform last week at Stratton Mt. She proved how good she was there. She made the least amount of mistakes. She's not big but she's very strong. I think the fact that she goes to Stratton Mt. Academy has a lot to do with how good she is. They have everything at the area concentrating on helping them ski race." Lelani said she "ski races to win." Unlike some girls who ski race to meet boys, Lelani's first priority is winning. win-ning. But she is not against having a good time as well. "I was talkinc tn mv coach, Patti Formicelli, and I asked her if she thought it was wrong for me to have fun while I'm not on the course, when I'm going to new places and meeting new people. She said half if not three-fourths of the fun are those things because after you do the training there isn't a whole lot more you can do. "But my ski racing definitely comes first and not just having fun," Lelani said. "When you train you have to get to bed at certain times and you can't stay out. I have my own state of mind and I have enough common sense to go to bed early and be rested for the next day of racing." Last year 13-yearold-Lelani caused a commotion at the Western States Championship Cham-pionship where she took advantage ad-vantage of some tailwinds on the giant slalom course and finished first after the first run by a comfortable margin. She beat such notables as Barbie Patterson, Patter-son, Doni Waldman and Roxanne Toly. But her results were later taken away from her because, coaches later said, she was too young to be competing in the race. "I don't think you should be judged on your age," Lelani said. "If you qualify fnr a mainr nnnta raw Contract TermsLow Down f "I , ' llllltHilBfllllHlHiil I 2403 Butch Cassidy Drive Prospector Park Maintenance free exterior 3 bedrooms 2 Vz baths 3000 square feet $144,000 Capson, Morris, McComb 649-8601 Keith Vanderhout 649-9363 He Was Nobody Till He Was a Flop Usually, it's not the way it happens, but I interviewed in-terviewed a guy the other day who was a nobody till he was a flop. He is the biggest flop ever to hit the world sporting scene. He revolutionized an entire athletic event by being a flop at it. A "flop" is usually something that opens on Wednesday and closes by Saturday. But his is the longest-running flop in history. You might say he flopped his way to stardom in fact, to immortality. Sonny Tufts? Hardly. This guy's a bigger flop than that in fact, the biggest flop since Gary Cooper made a movie wearing a tie, even bigger than Spencer Tracy in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." And nobody was any happier to be in a flop than Richard Fosbury. They even named the flop after him. I never got to interview the inventor of the curve ball, Candy Cummings. I never saw the perfector of the forward pass, Knute Rockne. I never met Joe Fulks, the inventor of the jump shot, or Jim Corbett who pioneered the left jab. Bui I expect all those guys startled the world of sports with their innovations when first observed. Still, nobody ever stunned sports more than Richard Fosbury when, one day in 1967, he approached a crossbar in a high jump event at Oregon State University and suddenly turned his back on it as if declining the issue: whereupon, he heaved himself into the air backwards and sailed over the height on his back like a guy being thrown out of a second-story second-story window. He broke the school record at six feet 10 inches. in-ches. The guy on the sidelines with his mouth hanging open was Fosbury's coach. Bernie Wagner. No one will ever know how close Bernie came to subverting history, how hard he tried to get Fosbury to abandon this kooky style of jumping because he said it would be well, a flop. In the little world of track and field, il was as if some-one had advised Napoleon to stick to gardening, or Caruso, the railroad. Fosbury did everything pants-backward, so to speak. His act was considered a novelty no more than that rather like the clowns in a rodeo. He would never get anywhere till he went over the bar legs-first like his grandfather did, was the advice. The reaction to his style was "very cute but what does it have to do with high jumping? " Everything, as it turned out. The 19(58 Olympics is best remembered for a fleeting salute, when Tommie Smith and Ji hn Carlos gave the finger or, at least, the fist to (he American Flag, thus opening a monumental can of worms for the Olympic movement. But it whp. r.'Herwise. a vintage Olympics. Bob Beamon jumped an incredible 29 feet 24 inches, breaking the Olympic record by an impossible 2 feet 7 inches. Al Oerter won his fourth gold medal, and the Africans swept everything from the 1,500 to the marathon. But Dick Fosbury set off the most seismic ground waves in the recent history of track and field when he broke the Olympic high jump record by going over the bar backwards, back-wards, TV 2". He flopped his way to a resounding hit. Phones were ringing in track-and-field clinics all over the world almost as soon as he hit the pit. The "Fosbury Flop" became the standard for the event in most of the world. The straddle strad-dle went the way of the scissors and the Western role for every high jumper except the Soviets who, as President Carter will find out, are hard to change. An Estonian won the 1972 Olympics, but by barely a quarter of an inch over the American flopper Dwight Stones. By 1976, the Olympic high jump was a flop from start to finish, and the Polish jumper, jum-per, Jacek Wszola, broke Fosbury's record by only one quarter of an inch You might think a revolutionary new design for the event was plotted out by Fosbury, an engineering major in his student days, on graph paper with al! the physics and mathematics worked out Actually, it was as accidental as thai, apple falling on Newton's head. "I just began taking a curved approach to the bar," he recalls "I would run five steps straight and then three steps on a curl, like a banana or the letter 'J' to get in shoulders over the bar." The coaches kept trying to translate this eccentric approach into a scissors cross-over. "But I was miserable in the straddle," Fosbury remembers. "So, in this one meet, the next-to-last, I began to hoist myself over backwards. I improved my best mark by six inches, and the crowd that day in Grant's Pass got such a kick out of it, I began enjoying it, too. The curved approach started turning me until finally I was going over the bar neck-first. neck-first. It evolved into the Flop. " It is still the only Flop that ever made a Star. And, lest it die out 'the Siberian breaking the world's record at 7'8" heights this year is a straddler) Dick Fosbury will be in the company com-pany of about a doen world-famous athletes at UCLA's Drake Stadium this Saturday and Sunday in a clinic for any aspiring young track athletes who want to come out, an event sponsored by the McDonald's Big Mac people. Fosbury will have to convince the kids that when they have something hard to do. they should t.irn their backs to it -and try their very hai .lest to be Hops at what they do. c) 1980, La- nr'Mes Times Syndicate shouldn't have anything to do with how old you air. They shouldn't hold you O A J back, maybe that's one Ji reason why the U.S. is F""- behind other countries, because we hold people back and the other countries are letting their kids go forward." for-ward." Now Lelani Soares is going forward. It may be that she will elect to go ahead like her sister did: Leave ski racing and become a "normal" kid. But one way or the other, Lt lani said, she'll be going forward. "I want to be the very best I can be or I don't want to do it at all," she explained. ex-plained. "That's just the way it is with me. LIVE LCBSTW L , -,r s 1 M L SEAFOOD, STEAKS rJ f Q0f ' 1 jjPV If: V |