SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS : TRADING OARPOWER FOR HORSEPOWER

Over and over again, the Olympics reach out through television and kidnap children. It happened to Tom Bohrer, when he was 8, watching the 1972 Munich Olympics from his home on Long Island. He was seeing Mark Spitz win seven swimming gold medals an ocean away and wondering what that must be like.

Bohrer was 20 in 1984 and had taken up rowing at Florida Institute of Technology the year before the Los Angeles Olympics. “So,” he said, “I watched all of the rowing that year and I said, ‘Man, I’d really like to be in the Olympics.’ ”

Four years later, he was earning a silver medal at Seoul in the fours without coxswain event, and the Games “definitely lived up to expectations.”

Except. . . .

“Probably the reason I stayed with rowing was that in ’88 I didn’t think I was close to my potential,” he said.

Bohrer is 28 now, on a leave of absence from his job as an environmental consultant in Philadelphia and a month away from his wedding. But the Olympics haven’t turned him loose; he wants a gold medal in today’s four-without final.

He is the only oarsman left from the boat that barely lost to the East Germans at Seoul. Doug Burden, who works for a loan company in Washington; Pat Manning, a Philadelphia financial analyst, and Jeff McLaughlin, who has a degree in architecture, join Bohrer to give an eclectic mix to the new four-without team.

Four years after Seoul, East Germany has ceased to exist, and though the united Germany has a boat in today’s final, this time Australia is the crew to beat. That explains the banner in the Penn Athletic Club boathouse, where Bohrer, Burden, Manning and McLaughlin train: “Australia vs. USA. To Be Settled in Barcelona.”

“I tell people,” Bohrer said, “that when I retire, I’m going to sell my boat and buy a powerboat.”

This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant, all Times-Mirror newspapers.