Sydney 2000
Student Olympians to Watch
By Erin Dionne
Troy Dumais
U.S. Diving Team
University of Texas, Austin
At 16, Troy Dumais won his first national championship in the
3-meter springboard event and narrowly missed diving for the U.S. in _
the Atlanta games. He followed that up with being named the U.S. Diving Athlete of the Year
in 1997. Now a junior at UT/Austin, Dumais is one of only two divers from the U.S. to com
pete in the men’s springboard event in Sydney. His road hasn’t been easy this year—at the
Olympic Trials in June he fell ill with 2 kidney stones hours before the finals. Tolerating the
pain, he made his last 6 dives and more than earned his place on the team.
“I told myself if I was able to walk, there was no way I wasn’t diving. I put in too many
years of training to just step out."
Seilala Sua
U.S. Track and Field
UCLA
Seilala (pronounced Say-la-la) Sua’s winning discus throw at
this year’s U.S. Olympic Trials was 216 feet, 2 inches—which
would have earned her a bronze medal at the 1996 games in
Atlanta. The throw catapulted her onto the U.S. track and field
team, and earned her a national title. A UCLA senior majoring in
Sociology, Sua is a fierce competitor and has her sights set on gold in Sydney.
In big meets I know I can turn it on. I m very competitive. Competitions are something I
love. I love track and field, and I just want to spread the news about it."
Gabe Jennings
U.S. Track and Field
Stanford University
Gabe Jennings took the NCAA Championships in the indoor
mile and the 1500-meter this year, proving that he’s one of the best
middle-distance runners in the U.S. In Sydney he’ll be competing for
gold in the 1500m race. A senior at Stanford, Jennings is as well-known
for his quirky behavior and his non-traditional childhood as he is for his
running. (He grew up without a TV, and his family generated their electricity using hydroelectric
and solar power. They also only ate food from their garden.)
“I started running to school when I was five years old. School was two miles away. I was in
a real rural community. My nearest neighbor was a mile away. My dad would have me run to
school and he’d bike behind me, making sure I had good form.”
Clarence Vinson
U.S. Boxing Team
N. Michigan University
In February, Clarence Vinson placed first at the U.S. Olympic
Team Trials for bantamweight boxing, defeating challenger Aaron
Garcia in the finals and earning a spot on the U.S. team in Sydney.
Nicknamed Untouchable" for his quick punches and movements in
the ring, Vinson boxes in one of the lightest categories—ban
tamweight—and tips the scale at 119 lbs. Growing up on the inner-city
streets of Washington, D.C., Vinson lost friends and family members to street violence. Now a
student at Northern Michigan University majoring in business management, Vinson sees the
reward of years of hard work and training.
“Boxing is my ticket to doing something positive with my life, instead of negative.” •
For profiles of more student Olympians, go to
steamtunnels.net and use keyword “Olympics.”
High-Tech Toys
Dozens of electronics companies are
providing high-tech toys for the next
generation of consumers. Portable CD
players, MP3 players, cell phones and wire
less pagers are becoming increasingly com
mon on college campuses—but
they’re boring in comparison to
some of the other products on the
market.
Fisher Space Pen
The Fisher Space Pen
(store.thetech.org/fisherspacepen;
$19.95) is no ordinary pen—it
was designed for use by astro
nauts. It can write upside down,
under water, over grease, in
extreme cold and heat and is
almost guaranteed to outlive you,
with a shelf life of 100 years.
Robomow
If your yard is huge, and you’ve
got better things to do than push a noisy
mower around, the compact Friendly
Robotis Robomow (productopia.com;
$795) is a great gadget. The little yellow
lawnmower will mow your lawn for you and
uses touch-sensitive bumpers to stay within
the perimeter.
C-pen Scanner
The C-pen (cpen.com; $249) may be
the coolest scanner ever. Use the pocket
sized, handheld device like a digital high
lighter and it will capture text from almost
any source. It’s actually a minia
ture digital camera that uses
Optical Character
Recognition (OCR), which
turns what you scan into
workable text that you
can easily transfer to
your laptop. It comes
with a built-in calen
dar, 1000-contact
address book and
memory capabili
ty for 3000
pages of text. •