Glenn Matsumura

tony azevedo

Italy's Alberto Angelini was used to getting hit in the head by flying water polo balls, but this time, at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, the ball came soaring from outside the pool. Angelini picked it up and hurled it back at the eighth-grade culprit.

He nailed 14-year-old Tony Azevedo, whose father, Ricardo, was an assistant coach for the U.S. team. Tony was responsible for chasing loose balls and pitching them back into the pool. In his excitement, his toss had accidentally hit Angelini. When the ball returned, smacking Azevedo in the back, the Italian player flashed a teasing smile. Neither had any clue that this boy would one day be described as the greatest water polo player in the world.

Watching the ’96 Olympics and seeing the Spanish players’ glee in the final seconds before winning the gold convinced Azevedo, ’04, to dedicate himself to water polo. Four years later, barely out of high school, he was the youngest player on the U.S. team in Sydney.

Now, as he prepares for Athens and his second Olympics, Azevedo hopes to help the United States men’s team do something it has never done: win the gold medal.

Azevedo’s legend couldn’t get much bigger. He has shattered Stanford scoring records, including most goals in a season with 95 (3.4 per game) and career goals with 252. A 2003 Men’s Journal ranking of the 20 greatest athletes in the world claimed that Azevedo has “been known to carry three opponents on his back and still score with his free hand.” Stanford and former Olympic coach John Vargas described his strength as “superhuman.” The magazine put Azevedo at No. 7. Ahead of Lance Armstrong. Ahead of Tiger Woods, ’98.

Azevedo was thrilled with the attention, mostly because it put water polo on a par with other, more heralded sports. The Long Beach, Calif., native wants people to love the game the way he does, to see it the way he does. That’s not an easy thing. In water polo, the kicking, the scraping, the yanking, the clawing—all go unnoticed to everybody but those in the pool. The fans don’t see how opponents pull at armpit hair and tear at bathing suits so vigorously that some players put Vaseline on their bodies to prevent foreign hands from grabbing whatever’s handy.

Azevedo has suffered broken eardrums three times. Once, after the blood finished gushing, a doctor told him there was nothing to be done about the pain. When a coach asked what he wanted to do, Azevedo gave his standard reply: “I want to play.” He shoved cotton swabs in front of his broken eardrum, put Vaseline over the swabs and pulled on his helmet. Not surprising from a man whose favorite activities when not with the U.S. team, according to the media guide, include “playing water polo.”

Azevedo wants to replace the final moment of the 2000 Olympics with a better memory. Down by one goal to Russia in the quarterfinals, the Americans stole the ball with under a minute remaining. Azevedo had the ball with seconds to play and a seemingly clear shot at the goal. Just as he prepared to shoot, an opponent caught him from behind and hammered Azevedo across the head. Time expired and the United States lost.

“That will never happen again,” says Azevedo. “Somehow, I’ll get that shot off.”

Christophe Simon/AFP/ Getty Images

Tara Kirk

Compared to past Stanford swimmers, Tara Kirk’s superstition is pretty tame. For example, Catherine Fox, ’00, a former Stanford and Olympic champion, had two pet rats (Jack and Tom) that served as lucky charms. For Kirk, it’s just a pair of green and white wool socks, and they even get washed on occasion. What started out as simply a way to keep her feet warm after ice baths at swimming meets turned into a ritual. Every time Kirk goes to a meet, the socks go too.

Whatever magic the socks provide, Kirk, ’04, isn’t about to mess with it. She has become one of the best breaststroke swimmers in the world, and is a strong bet to represent the United States in her first Olympics.

Lack of focus won’t be an issue. Her Stanford roommates tease Kirk about the intensity that occasionally takes her into another realm. There have been times she has stared into her computer screen, engrossed in an assignment, unaware they are talking to her. She is so focused in the pool she often can’t remember what she was thinking during her best races. “You can lose your race mentally,” she says.

Not that she’s lost many races. An 11-time NCAA champion, Kirk set the world record in the 100-meter breaststroke earlier this year at the NCAAs and finished her collegiate career with a 35-0 record in that event. She also won her final 19 races in the 200-meter breaststroke.

It wasn’t always that way. Unlike so many athletes bound for Athens, Kirk hasn’t been smashing records most of her life. She wasn’t putting on swimsuits over diapers. In fact, during her sophomore year of high school, when she began requesting information from colleges, she didn’t even evaluate schools based on their swimming programs. During the next two years, Kirk’s rapid improvement began to reshape her athletic aspirations. By her senior year at Bremerton High School in Washington state, the best college programs in the country were recruiting her.

Still, her attempt at the 2000 Olympic trials came up short. She placed eighth in the 200-meter breaststroke and ninth in the 100. Only the top two finishers make the Olympic team. “I was expecting to do better,” she says.

This summer, stronger and more seasoned, Kirk will aim her characteristic focus on the Olympic trials, hoping to qualify in both the 100 and the 200 breast. Her competition will be fierce, both at the trials and at the Olympics, and will likely include Megan Quann, the defending Olympic champion in the 100-meter race. “She has to get by a couple of people whom she hasn’t beaten many times,” Stanford coach Richard Quick told Swimming World in March.

“I think I’m going,” Kirk says. “I need to expect to do well in order to do well.”

Jim Bourg/Corbis

Cheri Blauwet

There are often bumps in the road, and when there are, Cheri Blauwet pops a slight wheelie. That’s how she keeps a straight course. It’s almost subconscious. With every few strokes of the two wheels at her side, she leans, forces the sole front wheel ever so slightly into the air, and quickly puts it back on its path.

Paralyzed below the waist in a farm accident as a toddler, Blauwet has been a wheelchair racer since eighth grade. The first-year medical student will compete in her second Paralympics in September, and will probably be a favorite to win the marathon.

Four years ago, in Sydney, she competed in the shorter events: the 100-, 200-, 400- and 800- meter races. She returned home with four medals and, shortly thereafter, extreme discomfort. Doctors diagnosed tissue necrosis in her bladder, a common condition for people who spend so much time sitting, exacerbated in Blauwet’s case by the constant racing and training.

When she heard the diagnosis after Sydney, she knew it was bad news for her athletic career. There were varying opinions on whether she should ever race again. She certainly had other things to do. She had a 4.0 GPA at the University of Arizona, where she earned her undergraduate degree, and was instrumental in creating a nonprofit to improve quality of life for disabled citizens in developing countries. But she wasn’t ready to give up competition. “Nothing can stop her. Nothing,” her high school track coach, Jay Rozeboom, told the Des Moines Register.

A year later, after bladder surgery, the chronic fevers went away and she decided to give racing another try. This time, she wanted something different. “I realized I wanted something more personally satisfying,” Blauwet says. She wanted the longer stretches of road that come with marathons.

Her first marathon was in Japan. It rained. And it was cold. Nevertheless, she finished fourth.

In 2003, Blauwet won the New York Marathon and repeated her victory earlier this year, setting a course record of 1:59.30. In April, she won the mother of all races, the Boston Marathon, in 1:39.53.

When her boyfriend picked her up at the airport after her Boston victory, he held up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle. Blauwet’s picture stretched across the top half of the front page. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she muttered. The calls and interview requests haven’t stopped since.

She’ll compete in Athens on September 26 (the Paralympics run from September 17 to 28) and while Blauwet wants to win, her story is a bit different from her competitors’. “In the scope of things,” she says, “a win in Boston is as big as a win in the Olympics. I already feel satisfied.”

Timothy A. Glary/AFP/Getty Images

Patricia miranda

Reno, 2002. Patricia Miranda, 105 pounds, arose from the wrestling mat and the past four years rushed to her head. She was a fifth-year student by this time, a co-term who had redshirted during her freshman year to maximize the chances of getting to this moment. Miranda, ’01, MA ’02, the only woman on the Stanford wrestling team, had finally beaten a man.

That match in Reno was a hint of everything to come: gold medals at both the 2003 World Cup and the Pan American Games, and a silver at the 2003 World Championships of Freestyle Wrestling. She would be named Women’s Wrestler of the Year by USA Wrestling and, deferring acceptance at Yale Law School, emerge as the best hope for a U.S. gold when women’s wrestling debuts as an Olympic event in Athens. But until her final year at Stanford, Miranda’s wrestling career had been mostly about losing.

Women’s collegiate wrestling was brand new when Miranda arrived at Stanford in 1998. There was no Stanford women’s team, and only a handful of women’s programs in the country, none more than a couple of years old. But Miranda didn’t want to wrestle women, anyway.

She had called Stanford’s coach during her junior year of high school in Saratoga, Calif., where she competed for the boys’ team. It was around the same time she found herself sobbing in a gymnasium restroom after a particularly bad defeat. All the heckling, all the sexist comments had finally gotten to her. “You’re a joke,” someone yelled at her from the stands after the match. Maybe she was a joke, she thought. Maybe she shouldn’t be wrestling, as her father had said so many times. The only way she had gotten him to stop fighting her, to no longer show up at practice and demand she come home with him, was to make a deal: she would keep a 4.0 grade point average or quit wrestling. She had kept her end of the bargain, but was she just a joke on the mat? Only one way to know for sure, she decided. She walked on to the Stanford team, vowing to spend her college years trying to beat a male wrestler in NCAA competition.

She started by setting small goals. She needed to find a training partner during the team’s practices and knew she didn’t have much to offer—she was small and not as strong as the guys—so she learned how to stick like glue to a wrestler’s leg. “That was my goal,” she says. “Nobody was going to get me off their leg. That was step one.”

Soon enough, the other wrestlers on Stanford’s team would partner with Miranda during practices. She could go days without scoring a point. She wrote more goals in her journal at night, and reviewed them the next day. Get an escape. Get a takedown. Don’t give up more than four points.

Some opponents came into the gym with something to prove, offended that they were wrestling a woman. “I was sure some guy was going to break my neck,” Miranda says.

Then, at the tournament in Reno during her last year, she had seven minutes of near perfection. She controlled most of the match and had her opponent nearly pinned with time ticking away in the third round. Moments later, Miranda heard the whistle that ended the match. She stood up, smiled at her boyfriend in the corner of the gym and walked off the mat. There was no victory dance, no triumphant thrust of her arms in the air. Just the realization, for the first time, that she was no joke.

Sergio Moraes/Corbis

Kerri Walsh

The Super Bowl commercial shows two young women on a snow-covered outdoor court, playing beach volleyball in bikinis despite what looks like frigid temperatures. They’re going at it hard when the ball is hit out of bounds and rolls into the ocean. Their faces drop. “Odds or evens?” one asks the other. A quick roshambo game ensues. Kerri Walsh loses, mutters and goes off to get the ball.

It may be winter, the ad implies, but these women are ready for the Olympics. And how. Walsh, ’00, and her playing partner, Misty May, dominate their sport to an extent that may be unmatched in team competition. Both members of NCAA championship teams in indoor volleyball, Walsh and May have won every tournament on the AVP pro tour since they began playing together in 2001. As of June 1, they had won 74 consecutive matches dating back to early 2003, and had earned 13 championships in a row. To say they are stars would be an understatement. Speedo, Gatorade, Halls Fruit Breezers and Sirius Satellite Radio are among the sponsors who pay Walsh to play, and she has been known to wear temporary tattoos featuring their logos. There are fan sites dedicated to her, and downloadable Kerri Walsh screen savers.

The partylike atmosphere of professional beach volleyball is a long way from the indoor game Walsh played at Stanford—she led the Cardinal to the NCAA title in 1996—and in her first Olympics in 2000. Those Olympics were bittersweet for Walsh. Just a half-hour before her first game, she was told she couldn’t play because a drug test indicated a suspicious epitestosterone to testosterone ratio. It turned out to be a mistake, and after being retested, Walsh was back on the court a few games later.

After Sydney, she was looking for a change and said yes when May, who already had switched over to beach volleyball, invited Walsh to come to Southern California to give the outdoor game a try.

“I had high expectations. I felt very confident indoors,” Walsh says. On the beach, it was a different story. She had to adjust to having only one teammate to cover the court, not to mention the sun, the wind and the thick sand. “I was terrible. I didn’t have my sand legs.”

It didn’t take her long to find them. These days, Walsh moves around the court like a cat, says Karch Kiraly, a legend in the sport. At 6-foot-3, with arms that seem to cover half the court, Walsh combines athleticism with intimidating shot-blocking ability. And a smile that marketers love.

Walsh and May are favored to win the gold in Athens. Their main competition: the Brazilian duo that defeated them last year, 13 titles ago.

Donald Miralle/Getty Images

Brenda Villa

The city of Commerce, a town wedged between freeways six miles east of downtown Los Angeles, has plenty of industry, as its name would suggest. Its workday population is more than three times that of its 13,000 residents and there are no middle schools or high schools within city limits. What Commerce does have is the Aquatorium, housing two indoor swimming pools and, on any given afternoon, many of the town’s kids.

It was never a long walk for Brenda Villa, ’02. The woman who would one day help Stanford win its first NCAA championship in women’s water polo and become a dominant player on Team USA had only to cross the street from her home to get to the pool, where swimming and water polo practices took up every night of her school week.

That was where she wanted to be, even when she didn’t have practice. It was where everybody went, splashing in the water, or running through the building’s rooms and outside the big glass wall that separated the playgrounds from the pools’ grandstands. The parents, sitting in those stands, watched Commerce’s kids grow up.

They continued watching Villa when she was halfway across the world, competing for Team USA as women’s water polo debuted at the Olympics in 2000. They watched as Villa led the team in scoring with nine goals, the last coming in the final two minutes of the gold-medal game, tying the score. And they suffered along with Villa when Australia scored the game-winner with one second remaining.

At the medal ceremony, Villa thought about how the gold- and bronze-winning countries had each ended on a victory, on a high note. Team USA stood there dealing with a broken heart. Despite winning the silver, “it was mixed emotions,” Villa says. “You kind of look at it like we lost the gold.”

Team USA has many new players, so revenge for that 2000 defeat is not a driving force now, Villa says. This team looks like it has only one color on its mind, having already won the gold at both the Pan American Games and the FINA Women’s World Cup earlier this year. Villa is the leading scorer. “She’s gone from being one of our youngest players with good talent to a true, seasoned veteran,” says U.S. head coach Guy Baker. “She’s the spirit of our team.”

The spirit of Commerce, too. When the high cost of a trip to Sydney in 2000 threatened to keep Villa’s parents at home, the city booster club chipped in to help defray expenses. Now, every chance she gets between trips and tournaments, Villa returns to her hometown, crosses the street and visits the Aquatorium. The city’s young water polo players beg her to get in the water just so they can say they played with her, and Villa usually obliges.

Villa isn’t sure what she will do after these Olympics, but she knows that giving back to Commerce will play a big part in her life. That Stanford political science degree might come in handy should she take the advice of the kids at the Aquatorium: run for mayor.

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