Track Shorts

When Mary Decker Slaney fell agonizingly to the turf in Los Angeles in 1984, a victim of tangled feet with Zola Budd, it seemed to be the painful end of an Olympic dream. The young woman, who at 21 began amassing world records, established herself as America's best middle-distance runner. But luck was never with Slaney, who seemed star-crossed where the Olympics were concerned. During the 1976 Games she was laid up with leg injuries, and she had to sit out the following Olympics because of the U.S. boycott. And by the summer of '88, Slaney would turn 30.

But she is back. Slaney gave birth to a daughter in 1986, and two weeks later was running six miles. That led to Achilles' heel damage, which required surgical repair. She emerged this spring, Achilles-healed, and at the U.S. trials she surprised experts by entering -- and winning -- both the 3,000- and 1,500-meter events. Now the prospect of a pair of gold medals in Seoul is not impossible.

"I'm really fresh and really anxious," she says of her preparations for upcoming confrontations with a strong Soviet, Tatyana Samolenko, and Rumanian Paula Ivan. There will be no rematch with South Africa-born Budd. Slaney's Olympic nemesis was tastelessly hounded into retirement earlier this year by foes of apartheid. Slaney recently has been on antibiotics for an unspecified illness, but her once fierce confidence has returned, this time tempered with the realization that dreams are oh so fragile. "Cross my fingers," she has been saying often these pre-Olympic days. "Knock on wood."