THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 7, 1994 TAG: 9407070690
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OLYMPIC FESTIVAL NOTES
SOURCE: BY PAUL WHITE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ST. LOUIS LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
The competition doesn't begin until Friday, but tickets for the U.S. Olympic Festival track and field competition are already the hottest in town.
Standing-room only tickets alone remain for each of the event's three days - through Sunday at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.
``This is a consistently strong field,'' said Dr. Phil Henson, commissioner of the track and field event. ``That doesn't mean everyone here is a superstar, but they all have Olympic potential.''
Henson says 80 percent of the 1992 U.S. Olympic track and field team had participated in at least one Olympic Festival.
``And I think you'll see a lot of these people on the 1996 (U.S. Olympic) team,'' he said.
The biggest name in this year's field is Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the world record holder in the heptathlon and owner of three Olympic gold medals.
Other athletes of note:
Alice Brown (100, 4-by-100 relay), a 1988 Olympic gold medal winner who will be making her ninth U.S. Olympic Festival appearance.
Sheila Hudson-Strudwick (triple jump), who tied her own American record last month in the USA/Mobil National Track & Field Championships.
Flirtisha Harris, the reigning NCAA 400-meter champion from Seton Hall; and former Olympians Connie Price-Smith (shot put), Sheila Echols (long jump), Kim Carter (heptathlon) and Tanya Hughes (high jump).
Local athletes scheduled to compete include the University of Illinois' Tonya Williams (Norfolk), the Big Ten 100-meter champion; St. Augustine's Joe King (Norfolk), fifth in the 800 at the Division II national championships; former Great Bridge and Tennessee pole vaulter Richard Fulford (Chesapeake); Tamara Cuffee (Norfolk) and Randall Evans (Virginia Beach).
Tony Wheeler, a Hampton native and the world's top-ranked junior in the 200, also will be on hand.
MISDIRECTION: Pay no attention to the team names East, North, West and South, because in many cases they have nothing to do with which region a player comes from.
The players are shuffled across regional lines in an effort to make the squads balanced. That's why a swimmer from Vancouver competed for the South, while two basketball players from St. Louis wound up playing in two different regions.
The regional names in field hockey mean also mean nothing, but there's been no effort to balance the teams. The North, featuring Old Dominion's Kelly Burch, and the South, led by ODU's Kim Decker, are comprised of members of the national training team. The East, which includes Virginia Beach's and James Madison University's Eileen Arnaldo and ODU's Samantha Salvia, is the U.S. under-21 team. The West is really the U.S. under-18 team.
The result is three distinct levels of field hockey. And while upsets are always possible, it's hardly surprising that after two days of play, the national training teams have lost only to each other, the under-21 team has beaten the under-18 team but lost to the national training team, and the under-18 team has yet to win a game.
FOR THE BIRDS: A hidden benefit of the Olympic Festival being in the St. Louis area is that it has diverted some of the attention of area sports fans away from the St. Louis Cardinals, who had lost four straight at home heading into Wednesday's game against Houston and were sinking in the National League Central Division.
The Cardinals hit the road today. Busch Stadium will be used by the Festival's baseball teams.
``It's about time we got some decent baseball in here,'' Charles Wade said after watching the Redbirds drop a 3-1 decision to the Astros Tuesday.
THIS `N' THAT: The cycling competition begins today, but it will go on without Chesapeake's Jonathan Nisbet, who made the team as an alternate but had to pull out because of an illness. . . . Nearly 12,100 fans turned out to see Tuesday's men's basketball game. Northampton High School graduate Ace Custis, now at Virginia Tech, scored 15 points to lead the South past Oliver Purnell's East team. It was the highest attendance for any single event of the Olympic Festival. The figure-skating final registered the second-highest attendance total, just over 8,600. By contrast, apparently no one witnessed the first round of the canoe/kayak event. The official attendance figure was zero. by CNB