大学英语四六级晨读经典365：夏日激情篇 95 The Greatest American Athlete 美国最伟大的运动员(mp3)

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095 The Greatest American Athlete 美国最伟大的运动员

The railroad station was jammed. Students from Lafayette College were crowding onto the train platform eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Carlisle Indian School's track and field squad. NO one would have believed it a few months earlier. A school that nobody had heard of was suddenly beating big， famous colleges in track meets. Surely these Carlisle athletes would come charging off the train， one after another，like a Marine battalion .

The train finally arrived and two young men——one big and broad，the other small and slight——stepped onto the platform.

“Where is the track team？” a Lafayette student asked.

“This is the team，” replied the big fellow.

“Just the two of you？”

“Nope， just me，”said the big fellow.“This little guy is the manager.”

The Lafayette students shook their heads in wonder. Somebody must be playing a joke on them. If this big fellow was the whole Carlisle track team， he would be competing against an entire Lafayette squad.

He did. He ran sprints， he ran hurdles， he ran distant races.He high-jumped， he broad-jumped.He threw the javelin and the shot. Finishing first in eight events， the big fellow beat the whole Lafayette team.

The big fellow was Jim Thorpe， the greatest American athlete of modern times.

Thorpe was born in a poor family of Indian tribe. But he had excellent natural gifts for athletic sports from his childhood. He excelled in every sport he tried. He had incredible speed and power. Once at school, he alone finished in eight events and beat the whole Lafayette team. In the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games, Thorpe won the pentathlon and the decathlon, the two most demanding Olympic events. But less than a year later, he was forced to give back his gold medals and prizes for being discovered he was not technically an amateur athlete. From then on, he became a sad, bewildered man and lived a poor, lonely, unhappy life for dozen years, but he was unanimously regarded as the greatest athlete in the world.


jam v. 挤，塞满
await v. 等候
incredible adj. 不可思议，惊人的
amateur n. 业余爱好者
bewildered adj. 困惑的
unanimously adv. 一致同意地

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