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There is, among them, even one old-style, Chariots of Fire amateur, the kind with true-blue attitudes and prosperous parents. John Biglow is a lean, powerful, awesomely fit man of 6 ft. 3 in. and 188 Ibs. who rowed stroke on the Yale crew. After gradation in 1980, he went back to his home in Bellevue, Wash., to talk things over with his father, Attorney Lucius H. Biglow Jr. "I think he was asking, Was rowing a respectable thing to do?" recalls the elder Biglow. His father gave his approval, but that was not all that John Biglow had been asking, of course. He needed financial backing, and he got it. He has been supported largely by his family since then.
Beginning in 1981, when he switched from eight-and four-man shells to single sculling, he has lived near Boston, trained six days a week, much of the time under Harvard Coach Harry Parker, and taken enough classes to qualify for Dartmouth Medical School in the fall. He has held no full-time paying job. Thus he has been a member of the leisure class, though with little leisure. Oarsmen row all year, on the water or on machines, and put in additional long hours running and lifting weights. "You can't have much of a social life," Biglow says. "Oarsmen are notorious for going to sleep at 10 o'clock."
Although he is counted as a good prospect for a bronze medal, he is convincing when he says that competing, not winning, is his reward. Merely to be in the same race with the great Finnish sculler Pertti Karppinen, gold medalist in 1980 and the favorite this year, justifies all the training, says Biglow. Athletics for money, as a business? Biglow finds the concept distasteful. But, he knows, his case is special.
The more modern predicaments are "those of the poor relations on the U.S. Olympic team, competitors like Rick McKinney, 30, of Glendale, Ariz., and one of the best archers in the world. He has won the world championship twice and the national championship six times. If McKinney should develop a finger blister, the U.S. also has Darrell Pace, 27, of Hamilton, Ohio, Olympic trials winner, seven times national champion and the Olympic gold medal winner in 1976. Last year Pace seemed to have tied McKinney for the world championship, only to see one of his arrows hit another arrow in the bull's-eye and glance off into the nine ring. To have McKinney and Pace side by side on the U.S. team is like sneaking two Boston Celtics disguised as college boys into the basketball competition.
The applause is not the kind the Celtics get, however. The U.S. is accustomed to winning the archery gold—John Williams, who coaches the U.S. team, won in 1972—but the fact is that archery is a "that's nice" sport. The shooters look nice in their dress whites, and the medals are nice, but no one gets excited. The result, says McKinney, a small lean man, is that "we're a poor sport." The U.S.O.C. contributes $750 or so a year to each of its top archers, but bows are expensive high-tech affairs with elaborate stabilizers and sophisticated aiming sights, and $750 is the cost of one of them.