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Sporting News, The, Oct 9, 2000 by Dave Kindred

Get your atlas. Look up Wyoming. Go to the western edge, hard against Idaho. Along U.S. Highway 89, in the Salt River range of the Rocky Mountains, there's a no-stoplight town named Afton, population 1,481, midway between Grover and Smoot It's a 3 1/2-hour drive north of Salt Lake City. It's high mountains and crystal streams and cutthroat trout that leap into your creel. What it is, is heaven. "But don't tell anybody," says the town bank president. "We want it to ourselves."

Too late.

Afton's days of anonymity are over, for a minute or two, anyway, because Rulon Gardner, born on a dairy farm there, raised baling hay and changing irrigation pipe, embraced by people he embraced, has gone and done that thing in Sydney.

We'll remember these Olympics because Marion Jones and Cathy Freeman were strong and swift. We saw again the wings on Michael Johnson's feet, and we heard, for the first time, the teeny-tiny toe motors that transform Ian Thorpe into a torpedo.

All that, we suspected going in.

Who knew from Rulon Gardner?

The wrestling universe, a small universe, may have known the big man from the little town. But even there he may have been known best for his worst moment He missed his weigh-in at the 1996 Olympic Trials. Missed by 22 seconds. Bad information. Slow elevator.

"He was heartbroken," says Dan Dockstader, editor of Afton's weekly newspaper, the Star Valley Independent. "He said coming home was the hardest trip he'd ever had to make. But there was no hard feeling in town. And all along he told me he'd try to go to Sydney."

Who cares about the Dream Team, those multimillionaires left breathless by Lithuania? The US. wins a baseball gold medal by sending lean and hungry minor leaguers against the aging remnants of a Cuban dynasty, and we're supposed to care? The shot putter C.J. Hunter, Jones' husband, the world champion and Olympic favorite, chooses knee surgery because he knows the drug guillotine is about to drop, and we think that sorry soap opera is an Olympic story?

NBC Sports flooded us with sob-story featurettes; who knew there were so many athletes with cousins whose cats lost a leg in a train wreck?

The sob stories were necessary because the real compelling forces in the Olympics are unattractive. The games are a convention of professional athletes trained to within a razor's edge of neurosis in pursuit of a lifetime's fame and fortune.

True story: In Atlanta, Michael Johnson's shoes glittered with gold paint In Sydney, they glittered with gold.

It is, yes it is, breathtaking to see the world's great athletes do their wonders. Their excellence is an affirmation of the human spirit that survives even the crustiest cynic's cold glare. Still, from lime to time, it's nice to be given a reminder that there is yet a vestige of humanity in the Olympic Games.

Such as: Big or blubbery farm boy from Wyoming, humble and sweet, 29 years old, one of nine children, knocks on hometown doors for donations to pay his training fees. He works his way to the Olympic gold-medal Greco-Roman superheavyweight wrestling match. His opponent is a steel-ribbed, Neanderthal-browed Russian giant who sprinkles gunpowder on his cereal.

Alexander Karelin, three times an Olympic champion, hadn't lost a match in 13 years, hadn't lost a point in a decade. How he trained, no one knew. Myth was, he ran high-stepping through four-foot Siberian snowdrifts.

In 1997, he beat Rulon Gardner so easily he didn't need to lift and dump the farm boy on his haircut, and, one guesses, Karelin figured Gardner would remember such a thing.

He did, and he decided it wouldn't happen again. "Rulon called me from Sydney," says his Afton neighbor, Danny Schwab, "and said, `I know how to beat Karelin, but I'm worried the refs aren't going to let me beat him.'"

The Gardner-Karelin match was thrilling in context if not in action. Mostly, the men grappled to no dramatic result The referee three times called Gardner for being passive, giving Karelin opportunities to score from on top. He failed. The match turned when Karelin's hands, gripped behind Gardner, slipped apart for a split second--a failure that in years past meant nothing, but under new rules gave Gardner the match's only point

At 2:40 a.m. in Wyoming, Schwab's telephone rang and he heard Stacey Gardner, the hero's wife, screaming through a waterfall of noise, "Danny, Danny, he did it, he did it. He won the gold medal."

At the Star Valley Independent office, editor Dockstrader had fallen asleep on a couch. Just before 3 a.m., the phone rang: "Rulon's brother called from Sydney. You could hear the screaming."

So Dockstader put on his radio broadcaster's cap, dashed to KRSV, 1210 on your AM dial, and spread the good news. "Only thing was," he says, "I didn't know if anybody in Afton was listening to the radio at 3 in the morning."

At 5 a.m., Schwab's phone rang again, and it was Rulon Gardner calling. "He was on his way to Michael Johnson's birthday party. He said, `Hey, Knucklehead'--he calls me Knucklehead--`did you feel the shock waves up there in Afton?'"