"Umbrellas?" she said. "But why?"

"Because people will spit at us," he said. "We have to protect ourselves."

"I put my head down like Ben Johnson," Krastev said. "But I was never in trouble."

For Krastev, the team's withdrawal was devastating. In 1980, he had missed his chance to compete for the national team because he was too young. In 1984, Bulgaria boycotted the Los Angeles Games along with other Communist countries. A world champion by 1988, he was to claim the spotlight he never had in Seoul. Instead, on the night he had expected to celebrate a gold medal, he cried and drank and hated the team officials who stole his chance.

In time, his grief subsided. He began thinking about 1992 and Barcelona. But unlike in the past, when Bulgaria's leading athletes were supported by the Government, the sports ministry in Sofia left its Olympians to support themselves, a change made more difficult for Krastev by the perception that he was a cheater.

At the time, the quickest way to earn money was to compete in professional power-lifting tournaments, as the International Weight Lifting Federation allows. He traveled to one event in Finland in 1990, then to another in the Netherlands.

"I was by myself," he said. "But I was taking care of myself." Reamaining an Outcast

His goal at the time was winning a gold medal at the world championships, in May of 1991 in Germany. But the path unavoidably wound through a national team camp in Bulgaria.

He was eager to prove himself the strongest man in the world. But upon returning, he found the same antipathy he had left.

"They treated me like one of the bad boys of '88," he said of the coaches and officials. "They felt I carried the torch of 1988, and Bulgaria didn't want anyone around who was related to those Olympics. I had been on the national team since 1978, but they wanted to clean up the team. So they forced me out."