Franziska van Almsick - The Unfulfilled Dream, Part 3

Some of the greatest athletes of the world have tried in vain to win an Olympic gold medal. We portray them in this series.

The name of her homepage says it all: Franzi - to Germans it's as simple as that. Even at age 38, Franziska van Almsick is called by and famous for her teenage nickname. It has become a household brandmark all over the country, in TV spots and the yellow press. But "Franzi" means business: When she criticizes Germany's swimmers as a TV expert or works as a fundraiser for the national athletes help network Deutsche Sporthilfe, there is nothing sweetheart about the woman, who - as a teenage girl - became the country's first post-unfication sports icon.

Still, one dark spot remains in van Almsick's career: She never won an Olympic gold.

When van Almsick (picture: Augsburger Allgemeine), one last product of the GDR's youth sports development program, burst onto the international swimming scene in 1992, she was just 14 years of age. On the early evening of July 27th, she stood on the starting block for the finals of the 200 meters freestyle at the Barcelona Olympics, having qualified in the fastest time. The German media were already nuts about their new darling from Berlin after she had taken bronze in the 100 meters 24 hours before. There was a real chance that the little girl could take it all.

But it was not to be. Van Almsick swam ahead of the pack for almost 180 meters, but on the home stretch, she zigzagged a little through the pool, perhaps due to a lack of experience. In lane five, American Nicole Haislett sneaked by the German wunderkind and beat van Almsick by one tenth of a second.

Nobody would have expected that this was going to be the closest van Almsick would ever get to an Olympic gold. What followed was a career of high drama with a lot of titles, records and profits from commercials, but no Olympic gold.

After becoming world champion and world record holder at Rome in 1994, van Almsick was again considered a heavy favourite for the 1996 Atlanta Games. But again, she could not stand the pressure in her best event, losing the 200 meters to Costa Rica's Claudia Poll, who was of German descent.

Things got even harder for van Almsick four years later at Sydney. Out of shape and with visible overweight, she had no shot at a medal. A German tabloid called her "Franzi van Speck" and a "pig". She rebounded from the disaster with another world record at the 2002 European Championships in her hometown of Berlin, but finished only fifth in the 200 meters freestyle at the 2004 Athens Games. When she retired afterwards, she had collected ten Olympic medals - four silvers, six bronzes, no gold.

When asked about that missing gold in August 2016, the now mother of two had no regrets: "For my personality, it was very good not to have achieved something in life.  I am happy and thankful for the life I live, I have two healthy kids, a wonderful family, I live humble - and I surely do this because I did not fulfil my biggest dream in life." (picture: dpa)

Anthony Nesty - The One and Only, Pt. 3

Some countries have won just one single gold medal in their Olympic history. We portray them in our series "The One and Only". One of them: Suriname. 

One 50 meters pool, ten 25 meters pools - this was all Suriname's swimmers had back in 1988. Certainly not the training facilities for an Olympic champion. That is one reason why the only gold medal winner coming from former Dutch Guayana was a typical breed of the United States' high school and college sport system (picture: extratime.uol.com).

Anthony Nesty was born in Trinidad in 1967. When he was seven years old, his family emigrated to Suriname, with little Anthony learning to swim at the age of five in the Carribean sea. His career did not really started off before he went to The Bolles School in Jacksonville in 1985 and later came to the University of Florida.

When he arrived at Seoul for the 1988 Olympics, he was not really unknown any more, having won the Pan-American Games title in the 100 meters butterfly in Indianapolis the year before. Nesty was a sure bet for a place in the final in Seoul on September 21st, 1988. But the center stage was expected to belong to superstars Matt Biondi from the U.S.A. and West Germany's Michael Groß.

But then Nesty stole the show - the same way and even more impressive than Australian Duncan Armstorng had done two days before, defeating Biondi and Groß in the 200 meters freestyle in a new world record time. In the 100 meters butterfly, Nesty came from behind and clocked an Olympic record of 53.00, edging out Biondi by one hundredth of a second. Great Britain's Andrew Jameson took the bronze (53.30), while "Albatros" Groß finished a disappointing fifth (53.44).

Nesty's triumph was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for his rouhgly 380,000 countrymen. Back home, they named aircrafts and stadiums after their new national hero. Suriname even put Nesty's picture on a coin (picture: numitsa.com). The man who made the least fuss about his triumph, was Nesty himself. ''After the prelims,'' he said, ''I knew I had a chance to win the race. I knew I was going to be in the top three.'' At the end of the day, it was his better gliding to the wall that had ensured his victory over Biondi.

In the following years, Nesty proved that he was by no means a one hit wonder. He won the Godwill Games in Seattle in 1990 and became a world champions the following year in Perth. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Nesty finished third behind winner Pablo Morales, the men who had kept the 100 yards butterfly prep school record at Bolles until 1987. Then, this mark was broken by a young man who was going to become Olympic Champion one year later: Anthony Nesty.

Suriname's only gold medalist ever is an assistant head coach with the Florida Gators' swimming team today (picture: radio10.sr).

Melbourne 1956, "Freedom's Fury" and the Blood in the Water Saga

When Hungary remembers the 60th anniversary of the 1956 uprising this fall, you will probably see this photograph over and over again - even in international media. The picture of the bloody face of Hungarian water polo player Ervin Zador has become an icon of the revolution. And it is one of the centerpieces of - as far as I am concernd - the best sports documentary ever filmed: "Freedom's Fury" (picture: cinemaromantica.org).

The film tells the story of the water polo showdown between Hungary and the USSR at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics against the backdrop of the revolution that had been stopped by communist bloc tanks only a few weeks earlier. Hungary had been the emotional top story of these Games from the beginning, but in this water polo semifinal match on December 6th, 1956, the heat boiled over. Even Swedish referee Goesta Zuckermann, who was considered to be the best in the world, could not stop the match from turning into an ugly battle. When Russian player Valentin Prokopov knocked out Zador with Hungary leading 4-0 in the very last minutes of the game, Zuckermann broke off the battle. Hungary was declared the winner and went on to win the gold, while the Soviets had to be escorted by police from the pool to prevent a riot.

Here is the trailer of "Freedom's Fury" from 2006, together with some archive footage of the match:

"Freedom's Fury" co-producer Quentin Tarantino once called the film "the best untold story ever". Writer and director Colin Gray described his intentions as follows: "Both teams were as much a victim of the circumstances and really both countries were imprisoned by the same ideology - and these guys were able to finally reconnect as human beings and as fellow athletes. That was something that we really wanted to highlight, the sort of humanistic side to counter the sort of oppression of ideology that everyone had suffered under in the Eastern bloc."

While every observe including the media only saw the political side of the "Blood in the water match", the most astonishing part of "Freedom's Fury" is the way many players from both teams remembered the encounter half a century later. To most of them, it was somewhat just another water polo match - hard, brutal, reckless, physical, but in a way normal competitiveness or just the heat of the moment. Especially the Hungarians, many of whom defected directly from Melbourne, seemed to have mainly winning on their minds, but not revenge for the counter-revolution back home. Zador later recalled it was their game plan to provoke the Russians until they would lose their temper and hence play badly.

To wrap things up: Although "Freedom's Fury" (by the way narrated by Mark Spitz) is a political film, it somehow reminds the audience that sometimes we should not put into sports more political meaning than there really is in it.

Gunder Haegg - The Unfulfilled Dream, Part 2

Some of the greatest athletes of the world have tried in vain to win an Olympic gold medal. We portray them in this series.

Gunder Haegg was a victim of his time and circumstances. When the Swedish long distance runner was at the height of his career, World War II prevented him from becoming an Olympic champion in 1940 and 1944. In 1948, he was denied the chance to compete in the 1948 London Games because he had been stripped of his amateur status two years before. Allegedly, Haegg had been running once for 400 Swedish crowns (picture: aftonbladet.se).

Haegg could have been a second Paavo Nurmi. The Swede, born in Albacken on the last day of 1918, and the "Flying Finn" were the only two men to hold every single world record from 1500 to 5000 meters at the same time. Haegg also was the first men to run the 5000 meters in less than 14 minutes. His personal best, marked on September 10th, 1942, stood for twelve years. The summer of 1942 was the crown jewel of Haegg's feats, when he clocked ten world records within 82 days. Overall, he smashed 16 world records - but never ran in a single Olympic race.

Directed by his coach Goesta Olander in the training camp of Valdalen, deep in the woods of northern Sweden, Haegg started to use a form of interval training as one of the first long distance runners. He paved the way for the methods later taken to perfection by the likes of Vladimir Kuts and Emil Zatopek, who finally broke his 5000 meters records.

Because of the war, only few footage of Haegg's races has survived. Here are some impressions from his tour through the United States in 1943:

After his athletics career, Haegg lived as unconventional and extraordinary as his running had been. He sold books about his races, was a fire fighter, forest worker, salesman. And he always remained an icon for his country. Sports historian Julin called Haegg "a national symbol for a small country standing at the abyss of war".

Haegg passed away on November 27th, 2004, near Malmoe. But there is one thing he accomplished that even Nurmi did not get: A Swedish band named herself after Gunder Haegg (until they had to switch their name following legal persecution) and dedicated a song to him in 1970. A song about nature, wolves, idealism and "lousy capitalism". Haegg will sure ly have liked this one (picture: racingpast.ca).

Ghada Shouaa - The One and Only, Pt. 2

Some countries have won just one single gold medal in their Olympic history. We portray them in our series "The One and Only". One of them: Syria. 

The peaceful village of Simmern in the rural area of the German Rhineland is far away from war torn Aleppo or Damascus. It's the place where Syrias's only Olympic champion ever lives today. But Ghada Shouaa did not come as a refugee - as so many others of her compatriots did in the last two years.

When Shouaa won the heptathlon at the 1996 Atlanta Games, it came hardly as a surprise. The 23 year old former basketball international had won the World Championships in Gothenberg a year before and the famous meeting in Götzis, Austria prior to Atlanta. When U. S. heptathlon icon and gold medal favourite Jackie Joyner-Kersee had to quit after the opening 100 meters hurdles due to a hamstring injury, and Germany's former world champion Sabine Braun proved to be out of shape, the way for Shouaa was virtually free. She triumphed by a comfortable margin of over 200 points (picure: Alchetron).

Unfortunately, injuries were going to haunt her during the rest of her short career. In the autumn of the same year, she injured her back heavily while practicing the javelin. Shouaa had surgery in Koblenz, Germany and she joined the club USC Mainz to get back into shape. She won a bronze medal at the 1999 World Championships in Seville, but never regained the shape of the glory days of Atlanta.

While living in Mainz, Shouaa's coach was Thomas Kohlbacher. His girlfriend Birgit Dressel, also an Olympic heptathlete back in 1984, had died on April 10th,  1987, from wrong medication or - as some insiders argue until today - from a horrific mixture of different doping substances found in her body. Kohlbacher has stayed silent about the details until today. While she later stayed in Germany, Shouaa's career had been jump-started in the early 1990s by a Russian coach: Kim Bukhantsov, who had coached discus thrower Faina Melnik to Olympic gold at the 1972 Munich Games.

It is not known which side Shouaa took during the civil war in her home country. Some Arab media say she openly sumpathized with Assad's regime, but the sources for this claim are dubious. Other writers dwelled on how badly she had been treated by Syrian sports authorities. What we know is that Assad's father and then Syrian head of state Hafiz called her via phone to congratulate Ghada Shouaa on her Atlanta gold. She is not only Syria's only Olympic champion until today, but also one of the very few Arab women to succeed in top level sports. (picture: Getty Images).