A wrestler, a fencer and a...

By the time the opening ceremonies of the U.S. Olympic Festival in North Carolina begin Friday, Larry Nicholson of Fullerton already will have finished wrestling.

Which seems appropriate, because the wrestling portion of the Olympic Festival--particularly for Nicholson--seems to be not so much an event in itself as simply the next hurdle along the way to the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

In this pre-Olympic year, the Olympic Festival is serving as the trials for two wrestling competitions--the Pan American Games in Indianapolis Aug. 7-23, and the wrestling world championships, to be held in France later this year.

The United States will send only one representative in each weight class to the competitions, although it remains unclear whether the top wrestler at the Olympic Festival will compete in both events or the top two finishers will go to one each.

And when it comes time to choose the representatives to the 1988 Olympics, once again there will be only one.

“It gets down to the nitty-gritty,” said Nicholson, 25, who finished third in the wrestling national championships in Las Vegas in April.

Nicholson, who works part-time as a chiropractor in Irvine and trains with an open club at Cal State Fullerton, expects his first match in the 48-kilogram/105.5-pound weight class to be Wednesday.

Nicholson began wrestling as a third-grader. By the time he was a legitimate member of the Tracy (Calif.) High School team, he was good enough to finish in the top four in the state three times.

He attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on a wrestling scholarship for a little more than year, but left when he tired of sustaining recurring injuries. Then, as part of a plan to finish his schooling and still be young enough to have a shot at the Olympics, he stopped wrestling for more than a year and began training in earnest again last year. In the meantime, he went to Delta Junior College and Pasadena College of Chiropractic.

Nicholson said although he trained very hard for the national championships in April, “to get motivated for this is really not that hard. I guess I’ll just see how it goes.”