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Angelakis, a strongly built 5-ft. 4-in. duelist with cropped brown hair, has been a star almost since she took up fencing at the age of twelve in Peabody, Mass. She is agile, very fast, and has a lot of what fencers call, admiringly, "stealth," an ability to strike with strategic deceptiveness. She is very determined and temperamental enough to berate officials who make calls against her. But she has never gone beyond the semifinals in an international competition, and although she counts herself a good prospect for an Olympic medal, the form sheet suggests that fencing is still an Old World sport. The best women who will compete at Los Angeles are the Rumanians, Italians, French and, now, the Chinese. (The missing Bulgarians and Soviets would also have dominated.)
In the U.S., fencing is still something to restrain sheep, and fencers are still at the stage of scrambling for subsistence money, recognition and enough new talent to broaden the sport's base. In non-Olympic years, the U.S. fencers who go to meets are not always the country's best; sometimes they are simply the best of those who can afford the trip. Before Angelakis made the 1980 team, her travels were financed for a year with $3,000 raised by the Greek Orthodox Church of Peabody. The odds are that the U.S. is not yet able to produce an international fencing star, but Angelakis does not believe the odds. She thinks the nation is ready for an attractive fencing personality. And she has just the person in mind.
The four-member U.S. women's flat-water kayak team, another "disorganized band of people committed to an offbeat sport," as one of them puts it, also has a clear commitment: to get past a 20-year soggy patch in which the U.S. has won no kayaking medals at all. Not many people in the country know or care about their crusade, and that seems to be just fine with the kayakers. "I think we're tougher than a Mary Decker," says Ann Turner, 27, a tall, striking blond who is the veteran of the crew. "We've had to make all our own arrangements, find a trainer, call the airlines."
Illinois-born Turner, who lives in Stockholm with her Swedish boyfriend when she is not training, has been a kayak gypsy since she was 17. "It takes six to eight years to get really good," she says. She made the Olympic teams in 1976 and '80, supporting herself by lifeguarding, teaching school and selling handmade sweaters and caps. Every dollar and krona she has earned, she says, has gone into kayaking; "I've never bought a stereo or a car."
She is regarded as a pioneer by the other paddlers: Sheila Conover, 21, a Californian and sometime student at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Calif., the most gifted natural athlete on the squad; Shirley Dery, 22, born in the U.S. of Hungarian parents, who trained until last year with the powerful Hungarian team; and Leslie Klein, 29, from Concord, Mass., another kayak gypsy who converted from white-water kayaking. Klein spent years "living out of a car in soaking wet clothes, eating gritty oatmeal." Her life is somewhat more conventional now; she is married to J.T. Kearney, a phys-ed professor at the University of Kentucky, who took a sabbatical to train for the men's kayak team, failed to win a place, and volunteered to be the women's team manager.