ATHENS -- For a while there, it was wrestlers. Then swimmers. Then shooters.

Edmonton has taken turns at being a hothouse for growing Olympians in several sports over the years. But never has the City of Champions sent such a diverse team to the five-ring circus before. And it's weird. None of them know each other.

"I think that's the saddest thing about our country. We don't get to fraternize with each other," says four-time Olympian, kayak competitor David Ford.

MET IN PASSING

"We don't have anything like the Australian Institute of Sport where so many of the athletes from so many of the sports are together. No matter where you're from, you sort of scatter around the country in your own little groups. Other than Susan Nattrass and maybe a couple of the others I met in passing, I don't know any of the other Edmonton athletes.

"I think it's too bad because we all, in each of our own ways, could be such an inspiration to each other."

Andrew Hoskins says the only guy from Edmonton he managed to meet was Ford - but that was at the Olympics when he was a spare. Now he's captain of Canada's rowing eights team, the closest thing our country has to a lock for the gold medal at the Olympics.

"He probably doesn't even remember me," says Hoskins of Ford.

And as for the others ...

"I don't even know who they are."

They're baseball's Mike Johnson, the Edmonton Trappers pitcher from Sherwood Park; Nattrass, the five-time Olympic trap shooter; four-time Olympic race walker Tim Berrett; two-time Olympic cyclist Lori-Ann Muenzer; hurdler Angela Whyte; Edmonton-born rower Jonathan Madick; gymnast Kylie Stone and diver Blythe Hartley; rower Pauline Van Roessel, Edmonton born, trained and raised swimmer Morgan Knabe; and wrestler Christine Nordhagen from Valhalla Centre.

They'd be more likely to meet each other at an airport than at West Edmonton Mall or at an Oilers or Eskimos game.

Hoskins and Madick live in Victoria, where the men's rowing team trains; Van Roessel in London, Ont., where the women rowers are located; Ford in Chilliwack, B.C., where the kayakers' headquarters is located. Johnson has been all over the baseball map; Nordhagen and Knabe and Stone all now make their homes in Calgary and Hartley lives and trains in Montreal. Van Roessel, who took up the sport in Edmonton and lists her home club as the Edmonton Rowing Club, now lives in London and Nattrass spends more time in Seattle, where she's currently employed as a medical research associate, than the time she dedicates to training and spending with her mom in Edmonton.

Hoskins, Ford, Johnson have medal hopes. Nattrass and Berrett usually manage to make themselves stories.

Hoskins is the most likely of the lot to bring home a gold. And as captain of the Canadian eights crew, which hasn't lost a heat in the last two years, he'll be in the centre of the story if they do.

He's in a strange space going into these Games.

Hoskins, who started rowing in 1995 at the Edmonton Rowing Club, went to the Sydney Olympics with Canada as a spare.

ROWING ROYALTY

He would have been such a good story there. He's related to rowing royalty in New Zealand.

"My uncle was going to fly over from New Zealand," he said. "He claimed he owed me that favour. I watched him compete at the 1976 Montreal Olympics when I was a little kid. He felt like he should reciprocate by watching me in Sydney."

His uncle, David Lindstom, had the full meal deal in the 1972 and 1976 Olympics. But his grandfather Ted was in the same boat as Hoskins at the London Olympics in 1948.

"The same thing happened to him," he said of being a spare.

I interviewed Hoskins for a story along those lines in Sydney. His last words to me four years ago were: "I'm going to make sure I'm in a boat in Athens in 2004."

He's not only in a boat, he's in the top boat in the world as captain of the crew.

It's like he said to me here the other day: "We haven't lost in two years. Not in a heat. Not in a race. We dominate."

Ford started training as a kid under the Quesnel Bridge and received a lot of crazy looks from early shoppers at West Edmonton Mall when he chose to train in the water there.

A member of the Canadian kayak team since 1984, who won Canada's first-ever gold medal in a World Cup event in 1992, Ford became the first non-European to win the world championship in 1999 and was World Cup champion last year. He's had three straight first-rate seasons since Sydney but has cooled off somewhat this year.

But when it's come to the Olympics, he's been a bust.

"Having a chance to come here and get it right this year is the only reason I'm still in the sport," he says. "I want an Olympic medal. More than that, I want a performance at the Olympics I can be happy with."

In his first Olympics in Barcelona he missed his first gate and ended up finishing 15th.

In Atlanta he missed a gate and finished 15th again.

"I had laser eye surgery after what happened to me at the Olympics in 1996 so I could see the gates for a change," he laughed.

"I decided vision might be an issue. I decided to open my eyes."

In Sydney he didn't even make the final.

"The Olympics happened all over again," he said of finishing 22nd.

Ford absolutely loves the venue here.

"Our facility is unbelievable. It's big, heavy white water. It's really going to be a showcase for our sport. You could put all of the Sydney facility into our change room. It's amazing. It's mind-blowing. It makes the one in Sydney look like a kiddie park and it was incredible.

"It's right beside the ocean and we'll be using salt water, which is a first. It ups the degree of difficulty and, I believe, plays into my favour. I feel pretty confident on it."

Ford figures he has some good luck coming to him at the Olympics.

KIDS' STUFF

Most athletes who get here have had the Olympic dream since they were kids, but not Johnson.

The Sherwood Park product, who made it to the big leagues with the Baltimore Orioles and Montreal Expos and has spent the season at home with the Edmonton Trappers, is headed here from Italy, where he pitched Team Canada to a win over Cuba in a pre-Olympic game. He never had an Olympic dream.

"I never thought about the Olympics, only about being in the major leagues," said the 28-year-old. "But ever since we qualified, I thought about it a lot. I think we have a really good chance to win a medal.

"Other than actually playing, the thing I'm thinking about is marching in the opening ceremonies and being in the athletes village and at the one Olympics being held where the Olympics started."

Johnson was on the mound for the Canadian win to qualify for the Olympic tournament which, amazingly, the U.S.A. failed in.

"I'll remember that bus ride home from Estadio National with all the players singing O Canada, really belting out the anthem, and getting back to the hotel, putting our uniform tops back on and celebrating together.

"It means a lot to be part of Team Canada to play in the Olympics. I don't think anybody gave us a chance. Nobody even considered it. I think we opened a lot of eyes about Canadian baseball."

Berrett will be competing in his fourth Olympics here. He's not considered a contender but he keeps qualifying and keeps ending up as an interesting story in just about every competition.

There has been an endless string of 'Last Shot For Race Walker' headlines for Berrett in the last decade. But he keeps coming back.

Like Ford, he wants to have one Olympics to be proud of.

"My best showing was 10th in Atlanta. I'd like to improve on that. And if all goes reasonably well, I think I can."

In Atlanta, for the first half of the event, he was leading. He was the guy the entire world was watching on television. He ended up having an Olympic, er, moment. He ended up 10th, stopped on the finish line and vomited.

Two years earlier it was the IAAF World Championships in Athletics. He was puking all over the place. Other contestants had to take a small detour.

Berrett called himself "dead man walking" in Atlanta. He was virtually dead on arrival at the world championships here.

"I shouldn't have come," he said after that one - but he's come back for more. Who knows what tale he'll have to tell after this one.

Like Berrett in Athens, Nattrass was leading the trap shooting early in Sydney. She couldn't hold it together.

HER FOURTH OLYMPICS

She was 50 and in her fourth Olympics. Last year she failed to qualify for Athens at the Pan-Am Games when her gun broke. But the woman who broke the gender barrier at the Montreal Olympics, who was the first to compete with the men and who is given credit for talking the IOC into creating a women's trap shooting event was given a quota spot by the international federation and approved by the COC. She is here living a dream she's lived before but at age 54 believed she'd never live again.

"To me this is just a miracle," she said.

Muenzer has made it back to her second Olympics after having been selected flag bearer for the closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games in Manchester.

"It's weird. You go through all these levels of competitions and all of a sudden it's like, 'Wow, I'm going to the Olympics again.' "