American athlete Florence Griffith-Joyner, also known lovingly as Flo-Jo, was a silver medalist in the 200-meter race at the 1984 L.A. Games. However, she gained much more attention and was courted by the media because of her natural beauty and her extremely long and colorful fingernails. Although she was considered a shoe-in on the U.S. relay team in the same year, officials denied her a spot because they considered her 6-inch fingernails to be too long and dangerous for passing the baton. There was no way Flo-Jo would put a nail clipper to those beauties.

American diver Greg Louganis, already a double Olympic champion in the 3-meter and 10-meter diving events (1984 Games), repeated this extraordinary achievement at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, although this time it was not without incident... During the preliminary rounds, Louganis miscalculated a dive and cracked his head on the diving board while performing a reverse 2 1/2 pike. Despite suffering a horrible cut and concussion, he completed the preliminaries, then went on to repeat the dive during the finals with near-perfect scores, earning him the gold medal.