Read the text. Are the sentences true or false?
Sporting heroes
What makes someone a sporting hero? Millions of spectators watched Usain Bolt running in the 2008
Olympics in Beijing. He broke the world record in three athletics events. At the same Olympic Games, the
American swimmer Michael Phelps won eight gold medals and broke seven world records. The world media
went crazy! Everyone loves a champion.
But at the Olympics there is also another kind of hero. Have you ever seen the film Cool Runnings? It’s a
funny film about a bobsleigh team from Jamaica. It’s based on the true story of a Jamaican team who
competed in the Winter Olympics in 1988. They lived in a country with no snow, they had nowhere to train
and no money from the government or big businesses to help them, but they made it to the Olympics and
they raced for their country. The Olympic Games have many stories like this.
When Eric Moussambani, from Equatorial Guinea in central Africa, swam in the 100 m freestyle in Sydney in
the 2000 Olympic Games, the international media reported it around the world. He didn’t win a gold medal.
He didn’t break any records. In fact, his time at one minute and fifty-two seconds was more than twice the
time of Pieter van den Hoogenband, who broke the world record with a time of 47.84 seconds. Before the
Olympics, Moussambani trained in a twenty-metre hotel pool. He only started swimming eight months before
the Olympic Games. The race was his first time in an Olympic-sized fifty-metre swimming pool. And the
crowd clapped and cheered for Moussambani until he reached the finish line.
These people are not champions and they do not go back to their countries with a handful of medals, but
they are heroes because they try.
1 The Jamaican government gave the bobsleigh team money to compete. _____
2 The team from Jamaica tried to compete in the Olympics, but they failed. _____
3 The newspapers and TV journalists were interested in Moussambani. _____
4 Moussambani swam in a fifty-metre pool for the first time at the Olympics. _____
5 Moussambani didn’t finish the race. _____