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 For U.S. superheavyweight McCoy, experiencing the Olympics exceeds all expectations
Wednesday, September 27, 2000 By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
SYDNEY, Australia -- For most of his 26 years, Kerry McCoy has trained with an eye toward someday competing in the Olympics. He has begged for sponsors, traveled far and wide to find the best training partners and sacrificed opportunities in the real world to make his dream come true.
After all that, you'd think McCoy would have an idea of how much the Olympics mean. In the three months since he earned the superheavyweight spot on the U.S. Olympics freestyle wrestling team, he has received quite an education.
His hometown on Long Island, N.Y., conducted a two-day fund-raiser and earned more than $6,000 to buy airplane tickets so his grandmother and 9-year-old sister could watch him compete. McCoy doesn't know how they did it, and he can't quite believe it happened.
Then Sports Illustrated called. This is a publication that doesn't exactly devote a lot of space to wrestlers, but editors wanted to feature him as a potential gold-medal hope, and they wanted to know if they could take his picture for their preview issue ... after they painted him gold.
McCoy accepted on the spot. He spent 90 minutes having his body painted, an hour posing for a photographer in the Lehigh University wrestling room and 25 minutes in the shower scrubbing off the gold paint.
"They painted my body first, and I saw my arms with paint on them but that wasn't a big deal because everybody spills paint on their arms," said McCoy, a two-time NCAA champion. "Then on the way to the shower, I looked in the mirror and saw my face, and I was like, 'Wow.' "
Not all of the paint came off, either. For the rest of the day, little pieces of gold flaked off, a constant reminder of what McCoy wants to win, as if he needed a reminder.
"Basically, you have to prepare for gold," said Dan Gable, one of the U.S. Olympics wrestling team's co-head coaches. "If you prepare for any other color of medal, your chances are that much less."
Neither of the wrestlers with Pennsylvania connections has considered settling for anything else.
McCoy, who finished fourth at the 1998 world championships (missing the finals after a controversial protest) and defeating defending national champion Stephen Neal at the U.S. Olympic Trials, is one of the favorites at superheavyweight.
Greene County native Cary Kolat has already won two world championship medals (silver and bronze) in the past three years at 138.75 pounds. He, too, is one of the top contenders for gold.
Like McCoy, Kolat is finding the Olympics to be a bit more than he expected.
At first, he had planned to treat the Games as if they were just another competition, and he almost didn't bother going to the opening ceremonies. He and Lincoln McIlravy left a day after the rest of the team so they could fly in with their wives, and they got into town the morning of the ceremonies.
After the flight, getting accredited and checked in at the Athletes Village and working out, Kolat thought he might be better off going to sleep.
Then he changed his mind, and he is glad he did.
"One-hundred ten-thousand screaming people -- that was quite an event," Kolat said. "I just decided I ought to go because it was part of the experience."
Both wrestlers, however, are getting tired of sitting around. Their sport is one of the last to begin competition, and they agree that it's hard to see the athletes who have already finished living it up in the village while they have to keep looking ahead.
Four weight classes will begin competition tonight -- 119 pounds, 138.75 pounds, 167.5 pounds and 213.75 pounds. Athletes in those classes will wrestle all of their preliminary matches in two sessions on the first day, the quarterfinals and semifinals on the second day and then have 24 hours to wait before the gold-medal matches Friday..
Kolat is in that group.
Wrestlers in the other classes -- 127.75 pounds, 152 pounds, 187.25 pounds and 286 pounds -- face a different challenge. Their tournament will start Thursday, and their three rounds of preliminary matches will be spread over three sessions, not two. That means the quarterfinals will be wrestled the evening of the second day and the semifinals and finals will be contested Saturday.
McCoy is in this group.
"We've all been debating which is better," Kolat said. "With Americans, in general, we're better conditioned than everybody else, and we would rather wrestle the entire Olympics Games on one day."
Added McCoy, "I feel like I'm here to win."
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