So often it's a language of shorthand, especially in sports, especially at the Olympics, especially when used to describe the athletes whose fame doesn't extend beyond those 17 days. Here is so-and-so, in an event you rarely follow, wearing the national colours, standing on the podium, accepting the medal, a hero in an instant, and also much unknown.
Except for the familiar personality capsules: designs clothing in his spare time; has a bar where patrons get bargain beers every time he wins; came back from a crippling injury; emerged from Ben Johnson's shadow; arrived in Canada from a faraway place; is inspired by a brother or sister or parent who never had the chance.
Emma Robinson, who is smart, thoughtful, who pauses before answering every question rather than turning on the sport-interview autopilot, who has an air of seriousness about her (and, in private, apparently also an air of fun), understands what her shorthand identifier will be during the Olympics in Sydney.
She is a rower, in the women's heavyweight pairs, and Canadians, even though the sport disappears off the radar between Games, have come to understand that it's something we do very well, that it's something in which we win medals -- four in Barcelona in 1992, six in Atlanta in 1996. She is a medical student at the University of Toronto, currently on an 18-month sabbatical from her studies, which is extraordinary, given the demands of high-performance athletics.
And she is a cancer survivor, which directly or indirectly links her with every one of those people who will be watching the races back home. The disease is a powerful touchstone, true common ground. The need for hope is universal.
"That's a hard one," Robinson says, following a training session on a hot summer day at Fanshawe Lake in London, Ont. What will it be like to carry that banner?
She carefully considers her answer.
"I would hope that if I'm known for anything it's for my success as an athlete in a sport that people in Canada like to watch," she says. "But on the other hand there's so many great athletes and there are so many stories out there. This one had a different edge to it and people are very interested in that.
"It's not a bad thing that people know me for what I went through with my diagnosis, but it's not the be all and end all of what I'm going to do with my life. I'm sure if people are still paying attention to me two or three years from now, it won't be because of that. It will be because of what we hopefully do in Sydney."
What Robinson and her rowing partner, Theresa Luke, hope to do is win a gold medal in the event, as Marnie McBean and Kathleen Heddle did in Barcelona in 1992.
The Winnipeg native, who was part of the silver-medal-winning women's eights in Atlanta, had become the Canadian team's dominant sweep rower from the starboard side. That won her one of the two seats. Alison Korn won the spot beside her, and the two of them went on to win consecutive world championships in 1997 and 1998. Then, when Korn was injured in 1999, Luke, a veteran of the national team, won the seat and she and Robinson enjoyed an undefeated season, won another world title, and recorded a world-record time at the Lucerne regatta.
Remarkable that, in pure athletic terms, she dominated an event at the world level with two different partners, while completing two years of medical school. It is something else again when you consider that in March, 1999, just a few weeks before the beginning of her competitive season, she had her cancerous thyroid gland removed.
"It was a shock," she says. "First of all, I wasn't even feeling badly. I was diagnosed in a routine physical and had no symptoms -- except for the lump. There was nothing there that would make you think, I'm not feeling well, there's something going on. Within 10 days of finding the lump I had the diagnosis.
"Everything was happening really quickly. Two weeks after that I had the surgery. There was a definite element of shock and . . . not betrayal, but you kind of expect that you're young, you're healthy, you eat right, you exercise, that nothing is going to happen to you. . . . You kind of think you're cocooned and you're immune to it because you're an athlete, but you're not."
Because of her medical training, Robinson had the resources to immediately assess her predicament.
"I knew, statistically, that the odds with treatment were good, so that part of it encouraged me. The fact that I actually knew the surgeon from school, I knew the nurses -- that part was comforting.
"On the other hand, I think you also deal with the diagnosis, and I didn't just deal with it as a medical person, I dealt with it as a freaked-out 28-year-old." A freaked-out 28-year-old who had a close friend diagnosed with cancer at about the same time, and then would watch that close friend die.
Robinson had gone from the hyper-healthy world of the athlete to the world of the sick, from doctor-at-bedside to patient -- and all with startling rapidity.
She remembers a conversation with her surgeon, all of the questions she needed answered, and how despite her medical knowledge, she just couldn't find a way to communicate.
"My mind hadn't caught up to the whole diagnosis and what the experience was like, and so I was kind of flustered. Maybe I will know better how to deal with it as a physician."
There was no question in Robinson's mind that she'd return to competition as soon as she was able -- and in fact she was back in training just four days after the surgery. Aside from dealing with the side effects of drugs she takes to compensate for the missing thyroid, there have been no lasting physical issues.
A more difficult decision, it seems, was how to let people know about her condition.
"I couldn't have gotten through without telling anybody, so that was impossible. People would know," she says. "I talked to Silken [Laumann]about this before I announced what was going on. . . .
"My feeling was that this was something I was going through that could not be kept a secret, realistically. So I'd rather be open, honest and up-front. And in that sense have control over the information and how it was getting out. Rather than waiting a couple of weeks when someone sees the scar and sees me away from the training centre, and then it's a rumour. It seemed like just one more thing I didn't want to deal with. . . .
"The hesitation is because you don't like to hang your weaknesses out there, and say, 'Oh look, I've got this problem' and give your competition any kind of edge over you.
"On the other hand, in return for being open about it, I received so much support from a lot of people that it probably made it easier for me to deal with it. Maybe that helped me recover quicker or get back to training quicker. I had random people who heard about my story in the paper e-mail me or call me and tell me what they'd been through. That was very encouraging to me and gave me hope that there was a good possibility I could get back [in]training and do all of the things I was doing. If people look at my situation and draw something from it that encourages them and gives them hope, that's great -- because that's what I received from people."
Robinson was fit in time for this summer's rowing season, and Luke again claimed the place as her partner. But, internationally, the ground had shifted. Utterly dominant the year before, Robinson and Luke found themselves unable to beat the pairs from Romania and Australia.
"Maybe last year, adequate would have been enough to do well," Robinson says. "But this year is an Olympic year. Everyone has been focusing on this for four years -- so adequate is not good enough. It's got to be exceptional. . . .
"I think it's easy to look at it from an outside perspective and say, wow, you're losing races now, are you getting upset? Are you stressed? That's not productive -- and I don't feel like that either. You learn from losing. We'll pick up more quickly on things that need to be improved upon, because obviously we can see that somebody is doing it better and moving faster than us. I think for us it was kind of a checkpoint."
This year's training in London, followed by a final phase in Australia, was designed to close that new gap, to find three seconds, to perfect the timing and communication so crucial to pairs rowing.
"I think it's a bonus to have a lot of time together and fine tune things," Robinson says. "The more in sync you are mentally and physically, I think you're going to get fractions more speed."
After Sydney, Robinson's course is clear. "That's definitely it until the summer of 2002, because I have to finish school." She'll return to classes in January, and later go through internship and residency, which would take her to within two years of the Athens Games. (Pediatrics and surgery are areas of interest, but Robinson isn't yet ready to commit to a specialization.)
But is that it forever?
"For me that's been eight years on the national team, two Olympics, so maybe that is it," she says. "Still, it's going to be very hard. I love being outdoors. I love being on the lake. There are some days, when it's beautiful and flat, I think, I can't see myself indoors 9 to 5. This is something that so fits my personality and the way I like living.
"If I had a checklist to start with, I've accomplished it. I wanted to go to the Olympics. I was fortunate enough to be on a successful team and win a medal. Theresa and I set a world's best time. We won consecutive world championships. There's nothing that I have on my plate that I haven't accomplished . . . except for going out there and putting together a really great race and making the last four years of training seem really worthwhile.
"If I don't, does that mean I'm disappointed and I come back? I don't know. I may be disappointed and never row again. Who knows?"
Need to know
Medal moment: Emma Robinson and partner Theresa Luke will compete in the women's eights, but their best chance at gold in Sydney will be in women's pairs without cox. The final of that event is set for 9:10 a.m. on Sept. 23, which is 6:10 p.m. EDT on Sept. 22. The competition: Romanian boats figure to give Robinson and Luke their biggest challenge. The Romanian team has dominated women's eights in recent years and two women from that boat, Doina Ignat and Georgeta Damian, have emerged as gold-medal favourites in women's pairs without cox. Ignat, a 31-year-old student from Bucharest, is rowing in her third Olympics. Damian, a 24-year-old student from Shagoy, is in her first Olympics. Ignat and Damian are at the peak of their form: They won World Cup events this summer in Munich and Lucerne.