News about Mark Spitz

OLIVER HOLT AT BERCY ARENA: There are some Olympic Games where everything one athlete touches seems to turn to gold. It was that way with Mark Spitz in Munich in 1972. In Beijing in 2008, it was that way with Michael Phelps. In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Simone Biles was Midas. Until she climbed on to the balance beam yesterday morning, it seemed she was going to be the face of these Games, too. After her psychological issues in Tokyo three years ago, when she pulled out of several events after struggling with a spatial awareness issue known as the twisties, she and her USA team were calling this the Redemption Tour.

On a November night in 1989, two weeks after the Berlin Wall's fall, seven people hurriedly but ostensibly toward the border between Romania and Hungary. The frozen furrows of a ploughed field crackled underfoot. They heard barking in the distance from nearby villages. The temperature had plummeted so low that the cold was a real threat, but it wasn't the only one. The seven people were embarking on their lives' most treacherous journey: they were going to cross a hardline communist state to another that was in the process of revolting and transforming itself.