oook here's an article i found about OTC:
Olympic facilities mold athletes into championsBy MERI-JO BORZILLERI THE GAZETTE
For the approximately 200 resident-athletes living at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, Olympic dreams are accompanied by daily realities.
Let your performance slide, and you might lose your place to live and train.
Whether you're 22 years old or 32, you'll probably have a roommate and a dorm supervisor.
Room and board are free, but this is not a 5-star hotel. Sometimes, this is cinderblocks.
"It's not the presidential suite at the Antlers'," USOC chief Jim Scherr said.
Fewer than eight months from now, the 2004 Olympic Games open in Athens, Greece. In a five-part series, The Gazette will look into several critical buildings on the 35-acre campus to see how the people inside are preparing for Olympic glory.
The U.S. Olympic Committee executive offices are in the Olympic House. The Visitors' Center welcomes thousands of tourists every year. But the daily training ? and daily living ? that athletes hope leads to gold or silver or bronze happens elsewhere on the former Ent Air Force Base.
Most people tune into the Olympic Games every two years. Resident athletes live the Games every day, and the clock is ticking.
At the main entrance to the training center, on Boulder Street near Union Boulevard, is a digital clock counting down the days to the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece, on Aug. 13-29.
Sometimes the pursuit of Olympic glory is not so glamorous. Dormitory living, for example, is rarely part of the highlight show.
To make the Olympic team, you might have to beat the person you see in ? or on the way to ? the hallway bathroom every morning. You might live in a one-room dorm, well after your college days are over. You might have to Scotch-tape the phone cord to the ceiling so you and your roommate can share the phone for Internet access.
Athletes buy space-efficient shelving at Sam's Club to keep their tiny bedrooms from overflowing with clothing because there's not enough room for a bureau.
For some of the larger residents, it means finding a new way to roll over in bed.
Shane Hamman competed in the 2000 Summer Olympics in weightlifting. He is 5-foot-9 and 348 pounds.
I jerk my body and land sideways, Hamman said of sleeping in his suite's twin bed. The room's too small to push two beds together, said Hamman, chuckling.
Qualifications for a bed at the training center differ by sport, but they have one thing in common: Only the elite get in.
For freestyle male wrestlers, 80 percent of those in the resident program must be ranked in the top six nationally; 20 percent must show potential to make the U.S. Olympic Team in 2008 or 2012.
Triathletes, for instance, must meet minimum time standards to show they're world-class caliber. Most earn their residency with a top-60 world ranking, a top-10 World Cup finish or by making the world championship team.
Athletes live in dorms or suites. Two dorm buildings, a short walk from the dining hall, are renovated barracks built in the 1940s as part of the Ent Air Force Base that became the Olympic complex in 1978. By contrast, the sixyear-old suites are more modern.
The old dorms are home base for the men's and women's volleyball teams and men's and women's wrestling, among others. Each room usually sleeps two, has a sink and cinderblock walls that hamper cellphone connections. Bathrooms are at the end of the hall.
When the USOC began building housing for athletes, it chose suites. The suites feature two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a common living room, and a convenient walk to the dining hall, located in the same building. The bedrooms sleep two, but if you're lucky you can score a room to yourself.
While beds are usually assigned randomly, athletes contend the more successful you are, the more leverage you have for better living.
[glow=red,2,300]Apolo Ohno, the two-time Olympic medalist in short-track speedskating and biggest live-in celebrity on campus, has his own room but shares his suite with another athlete. (Olympic wrestling gold medalist Rulon Gardner still trains at the OTC, but he now lives in a house in the area.)[/glow]
Hamman is one of the lucky ones. He not only lives in a suite but has managed to wangle ? for a few months, anyway ? the most enviable of training-center commodities: personal space.
Hamman lives alone and has converted the spare bedroom into a computer room and storage space for overflow clothing.
Suites generally are given to longterm residents, who make up about 40 percent of the live-in population. Most on-site residents are short-timers attending camps lasting a few weeks or less. They generally get the dorms.
USA Shooting team member Jason Turner, 28, a Pan Am Games gold medalist, has lived at the training center for eight straight years, longer than anyone. But the savvy Turner is an olddorm guy, trading nicer digs for a solo crib. You have a better chance to get your own room in the dorms.
Being able to kick back and be myself is more important to me than having to share a room that was nicer with somebody else,? Turner said.
That's the prevailing opinion among an aging Olympic population that lives in the three national training centers. The other two are in Chula Vista, Calif., and Lake Placid, N.Y.
For the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the average age for the U.S. Olympic team was a little older than 26; for Sydney in 2000, it was 27; for 2002 in Salt Lake, it had crept past 27.
The average age, and hours spent training, explains why most athletes describe the resident-athlete atmosphere here as barely north of mellow. Rules say no beer and no illegal drugs on site, and no sleepovers, even if it's a spouse. If you're married, you must live off campus if you want to live with your spouse.
Children are not allowed in the dormitories. Resident-athletes must be 15 years old. Visiting athletes can be as young as 12. Men and women are not assigned to the same rooms, but there is no gender separation on floors. There is a men's and women's bathroom in each hallway in the dorms.
Most pets aren't allowed. Fish are. Gymnast Jason Gatson had a tank full of piranhas once. A snake and iguana have been among the contraband pets at the OTC.
The training center has no curfew, yet late-night hijinks are rare. When you're 25, Saran-Wrapping the toilet seat or filling the shower head with Kool-Aid powder doesn't hold much appeal.
Ask around, and you hear of a water-balloon raid; a raccoon lured inside the dorms; a profane pronouncement stamped in the snow; a mouse trapped live in a bathroom and released at the nearby velodrome, where its captors tried to coax it around a lap or two. Tame stuff.
Mostly, resident-athletes live and breathe their sport. They have to perform well, or they're gone. Turner's a survivor. He has yet to make his first Olympic team, but he's consistently ranked high. He won gold in August's Pan Am Games and is on the Athens track.
They try and rotate people out and move people on if it doesn't look like they're going to make it, Turner said.
On-campus accommodations have their limits, but for the most part,
athletes don't take the place for granted. Those lucky enough to be here wouldn't want to be anywhere else."Where else, said U.S. world team triathlete Mark Fretta,
can you have breakfast with the strongest man in the country, lunch with Rulon Gardner, ride (bikes) with people likely to win gold medals in the afternoon [glow=red,2,300]and hang out with the best speedskater in the world?"[/glow]
OTC has very strict requirements!!!jeez!!!
