2004 Olympics: Preview

02:10 AM CDT on Monday, August 9, 2004

From Staff Reports

Steve Lopez of Sugar Land, Texas, won't be a stranger to the Olympics, just a newcomer to his taekwondo weight class. He won the gold medal as a featherweight at the 2000 Sydney Games, where his sport made its Olympic debut.

Lopez, 25, had to shift to the welterweight class when his former division wasn't included for the Athens Olympics. He won the 2003 world title as a welterweight. He also prevailed at the Pan Am Games in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, last summer.

His sister, Diana, lost her chance to join Lopez on Team USA for Athens when she fell in sudden-death overtime to Nia Abdallah at the Olympic Trials in June.

Lopez identified his greatest challenge as the need to keep his intensity at a high level. His brother Jean, who coaches him, said experience has seasoned and sharpened Steve's skills.

— Cathy Harasta

In 1999, DeSoto native Sara Lowe was the youngest participant at the U.S. Synchronized Swimming Olympic Team Trials. Now, the 20-year-old is headed to her first Olympics.

"Always my goal was 2008," Lowe said. "I always thought I'd be too young for this one, but it turned out our team is a young team."

Lowe, who will attend Stanford, moved to California to train five years ago. Before that, she competed for the local Pirouettes of Texas.

In her first World Championships last year, Lowe was part of a bronze medal-winning U.S. team. She had confidence she would earn an Olympic spot. The Athens team was chosen in several waves, and she was named to the squad as part of the second group in May 2003.

— Rachel Cohen

The simple math on Rockwall sailor Paul Foerster in Athens: He'll make his fourth attempt at finishing first in a two-man boat ... while sailing for three for the first time.

Foerster, 40, will team with fellow Olympic veteran Kevin Burnham of Miami for the first time in Olympic competition in the 470 class. That's the category in which Foerster and Robert Merrick finished second to Australia's Mark Turnbull and Tom King in Sydney four years ago.

Foerster's other Olympic medal was a silver at Barcelona in 1992 in the Flying Dutchman class, which was then dropped.

Foerster's status in November's Olympic Trials was in doubt with wife Carrie expecting at that time.

Son Luke was born three days before the trials began. Foerster was on the water in time to qualify.

— Jeff Miller

Laura Wilkinson, the 2000 Olympic gold medalist in platform diving from Spring, Texas, will not fulfill her goal of winning multiple medals this summer because she qualified only in platform.

She had hoped to qualify in synchronized platform, in which she finished fifth in Sydney. She has to be considered a favorite in her specialty. She got married in September 2002, and she is 26 now but still trains at least six hours a day, six days a week.

In addition to winning platform at the U.S. Olympic Trials, she earned gold at the U.S. National Diving Championships in late July.

— Brad Townsend

Before her judo championship match at the Olympic Trials, Nikki Kubes looked across at her opponent, who was bleeding from the corner of her mouth and crying.

Kubes, a Fort Worth native, saw an opportunity.

"She's all mine," Kubes (pronounced "cubes") told her coach moments before she wrapped up the Olympic berth.

Kubes, 17, is, by six months, the second-youngest judo player on the U.S. women's team. She graduated in June from Fort Worth Southwest, and she plans to take the fall semester off before enrolling at Tarrant County College.

She will be an underdog because of her age, but Kubes (6-0, 172) said she hopes to win a gold medal in the women's half heavyweight division.

"That's what I've been training for my whole life," she said.

— Rick Alonzo