Olympians

Mayor Rendell and City Council President John F. Street led the city's salute to its Olympic heroes yesterday at Dilworth Plaza. Gold medalist boxer David Reid (above), and Dawn Staley, a member of the gold-medal-winning basketball team, sign autographs for their fans outside City Hall. Each Olympian received a replica of the Liberty Bell.

You could watch the Soviet National basketball team on television Saturday afternoon, but you couldn't watch the U.S. Olympic team in the St. Joseph's University gym. You couldn't even get close. The U.S. Olympians spent more than two hours scrimmaging and running controlled possessions against the 76ers' rookies and free agents behind doors sealed to the public and the media at St. Joe's. A day earlier, the Olympians had practiced against both the Sixers' and the New York Knicks' rookies and free agents at Princeton University's Jadwin Gym. Saturday's workout was the first in Philadelphia since the June 28 NBA draft for Hersey Hawkins, the 6-3 shooting guard from Bradley who will join the Sixers after the completion of the Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.

After the Turin Olympics in 2006, Peter Laviolette, then Carolina's coach, heard about players returning from the Games and asking for a little break so they could refuel their tanks after the physical and emotional grind of the international tourney. But if Olympians such as Chris Pronger, Mike Richards, and Kimmo Timonen have thoughts about sitting out tomorrow's game at Tampa Bay, they might want to think again. "This is our livelihood here," Laviolette said after putting the Flyers through a high-tempo practice yesterday at the Skate Zone in Voorhees.

If you were at the Penn Relays in April 2004, you might have noticed the tall, lanky kid running a 4 x 100 relay leg for William Knipp High of Jamaica. That was three-time Olympic champion and world record setter Usain Bolt, who also ran at Franklin Field a year later with a Jamaican team in the USA vs. the World series. Quick research by Penn Relays Meet Director Dave Johnson shows a total of 48 2008 Olympic medal winners have run at Franklin Field since the 2004 Olympics, whether at the high school, college or professional level.

The first NBA players ever to compete for the United States Olympic basketball team will be named on a live NBC Sports special presentation on Saturday, Sept. 21. Bob Costas, host of NBC's "NBA Showtime," and Marv Albert, play-by-play announcer for the NBA on NBC, will co-host the program. The decision to use pros is for the 1992 Summer Games only and will be reviewed after the Olympics. College players for the team will be selected after the NCAA season. Olympic assistant Mike Krzyzewski said that Magic Johnson, David Robinson and Karl Malone could be among the NBA players on the Olympic team.

At Navy, where he was the college basketball Player of the Year in 1987, David Robinson was known simply as "The Admiral. " But lately, he has appeared more suited for deck-swabbing duty. Robinson, the first pick in the 1987 NBA draft, was expected to become one of the focal points of the U.S. Olympic team. That, however, was before it became clear how much of a toll his postgraduate military commitment had taken on his skills. Rusty and out of shape, he struggled during a June tour of Europe with the U.S. Select team.

The world outdoor track and field season may be in its early stages. The weather may be a little on the chilly side. But Maurice Greene and his U.S. Olympic colleagues are promising a good show today at the Penn Relays. "I'm not going to hold back just because it's cold outside," Greene, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, said yesterday. "I have to prepare myself for whatever it is I have to deal with. The fans didn't come out here to see somebody holding back because it's cold.

U.S. Olympic basketball coach John Thompson missed the second half of his team's 91-79 victory over a group of NBA stars with a slight case of food poisoning, but he should feel much better today when he breaks down the video teapes. It should be like watching reruns of Georgetown during the Patrick Ewing era. The U.S. finally bore its teeth last night, and Thompson loved every minute of it. He now has the Olympians thinking like his Hoya teams, which have been notorious for their relentless, sometimes confrontational style of play.

Hersey Hawkins has decided he'll just take U.S. Olympic basketball coach John Thompson at his word. "Coach Thompson says we shouldn't try to figure out what he's doing," said Hawkins after a team of potential U.S. Olympians beat a team of NBA players, 90-82, yesterday at the Providence Civic Center. Actually, Hawkins had little choice but to grin and believe Thompson. The guard from Bradley started the game, played nine first-half minutes, went to the locker room and never got off the bench again.

On Thursday, shortly after the Olympic basketball charter departed Washington's Dulles Airport, the pilot made a sobering announcement. There was minor trouble in the right engine, he said. The plane would be turning around. J.R. Reid, ever the relaxed passenger, took a look at the propeller-driven engine and screamed, "There's oil coming out. " Smoke, too. The more squeamish players put on their headsets. If the end was near, they wanted to hear music or angels, not Reid's dark play-by-play.

Forty-four years after he and Tommie Smith shocked the world with their black-gloved salute on the awards podium at the Mexico City Olympics, John Carlos thought it was time to explain why, and The John Carlos Story was born. "I wrote the book to give my kids and my grandkids an overview of what it was all about from my mind and heart in terms of what I perceived was happening, not what was being written," Carlos, 66, said Thursday, sitting at a table at a gate of Franklin Field signing copies with the inscription, "We live to make history.

LeRoy Walker, 93, the first African American president of the U.S. Olympic Committee who attended the Penn Relays for six decades as a coach and referee, died Monday in Durham, N.C. Dr. Walker spent more than 40 years at North Carolina Central, first as track coach and later as chancellor. During his career, he coached eight Olympians who won a total of 11 medals, including back-to-back golds by hurdler Lee Calhoun in 1956 and 1960. Dr. Walker became the first African American coach of the U.S. Olympic men's track and field team in 1976 and led the squad to 22 medals, including six gold.

Jordan Burroughs is one of the biggest names in wrestling, but outside his sport he lives an athletic existence in relative anonymity. A 2006 graduate of Winslow Township High in Camden County, Burroughs is a world champion, and he doesn't have to worry about getting mobbed by well-wishers and autograph-seekers when walking the street in most locations. "Outside of wrestling fans, I would say I get recognized a small amount," Burroughs said in a phone interview from the University of Nebraska as he prepared for this weekend's Olympic trials at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

OLYMPIC CHAMPION LaShawn Merritt was cleared to defend his 400-meter title in London next year after the American won his appeal yesterday against an IOC rule banning doping offenders from the games. The Court of Arbitration for Sport annulled the International Olympic Committee rule that bars any athlete who has received a doping suspension of more than 6 months from competing in the next summer or winter games. The three-man CAS panel said the rule, adopted in 2008, was "invalid and unenforceable" because it amounted to a second sanction and did not comply with the World Anti-Doping Agency code.

MONACO - After waiting for nearly 30 years, the glitzy principality of Monaco has a new princess. Charlene Wittstock, a onetime Olympic swimmer from South Africa, married Prince Albert II in an intimate civil ceremony Friday. A more elaborate religious ceremony will be held Saturday. Wittstock follows in the steps of Grace Kelly, the Hollywood beauty and Philadelphian who wed Albert's father, Prince Rainier III, in 1956 and had three children with him. Grace died in a car crash in 1982; Rainier died in 2005.

In October, one of America's top swimmers - Fran Crippen of Conshohocken - drowned in mid-80-degree water during the 10K Marathon Swimming World Cup race off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Since then, his sister Maddy has made safety in open-water swimming her mission. Maddy Crippen, an Olympic swimmer, is a managing director with the architectural/engineering firm Nelson. She spoke to Inquirer staff writer Mari A. Schaefer.   Question: How has Fran's death changed your outlook?

Just a few blocks from the 13-year-old Franklin Field, where the young black man with the long stride had become one of Philadelphia's best-known athletes, a great crowd gathered outside his parents' house at 3323 Woodland Ave. Later on that chilled December day in 1908, a long procession of horse-drawn carriages and a few motor cars headed west to Collingdale's Eden Cemetery, where John Baxter Taylor was mourned thoroughly, eulogized grandly, and...

Former Olympian Antonio Pettigrew , 42, a sprinter stripped of a gold medal after admitting to doping, was found dead in the backseat of his locked car early Tuesday, Chatham County (N.C.) authorities reported. Authorities said they are unsure if his death was accidental or a suicide after his car, containing evidence that the North Carolina assistant track coach had taken sleeping pills, was found parked by a bridge. COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Penn State senior tailback Evan Royster is on the watch list for the Walter Camp Football Foundation's player of the year award and teammate Jack Crawford , a junior defensive end, was nominated for the Chuck Bednarik award, the nation's defensive player of the year.

SALES 1. "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" 2. "Hot Tub Time Machine" 3. "The Book of Eli" 4. "Alice in Wonderland" 5. "Green Zone" 6. "Avatar" 7. "The Jerk" 8. "Conan: The Complete Quest" 9. "Half Baked 10. Scarface" ONLINE 1. "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" 2. "Hot Tub Time Machine" 3. "The Book of...

William Nyman Ashenfelter, 85, of Malvern, a business owner, track star, and Olympic athlete, died of complications from a stroke Friday, June 4, at Neighborhood Hospice in West Chester. After service in the Army, Mr. Ashenfelter earned a bachelor's degree from Pennsylvania State University, where he joined his older brother, Horace "Nip," and younger brother, Donald, on the track team. While at Penn State he won the Atlantic City Boardwalk Mile and was an Amateur Athletic Union cross-country champion.