San Diego’s Fraternity Takes Its Best Shot : Olympics: Shotputters Pagel, Dasse and Doehring face challenge in Barcelona.

It’s the size of a large orange, except it weighs 8.8 pounds and sets off alarms and red lights at airport security stations.

But at Lindbergh Field guards have become somewhat accustomed to the metal projectiles that Ramona Pagel, Bonnie Dasse and Jim Doehring try to carry onto airplanes.

“They used to ask, ‘What is this, a bomb?’ ” Pagel said earlier this month. “But now by the time I get to the checkpoints, they already know what it is because Jim has already been there and explained it to them. Now they just say, ‘Oh yeah, someone else just carried one through.’ ”

Pagel, Dasse and Doehring have passed through several airports in the past week on their way to Barcelona, where they will lead the American shotput contingent into Olympic competition.

Their journeys all had a similar starting point--Southern California.

Dasse grew up in Orange County, where she now resides, and competed for San Diego State in the early 1980s. She spent the past year driving down to San Diego to train with Pagel. Pagel grew up in Los Angeles before accepting a scholarship at SDSU. She and her husband, Kent, live in Clairemont and coach at Mesa College. And Doehring is a long-time resident of Fallbrook.

Pagel and Dasse can’t agree on whether it’s coincidence that many of the top American shotputters have roots in San Diego County.

“It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” Ramona said rhetorically. “Half of our Olympic shotputters are from right around here.”

It’s a small fraternity that has garnered an enormity of success.

Pagel, in fact, holds the American record at 66 feet, 2 1/2 inches. She established that mark at Balboa Stadium in 1988, the last time San Diego hosted a professional track meet. She is the top American woman who will compete in the shot at Barcelona during the next two weeks, having thrown a 59-6 3/4 at last month’s trials in New Orleans. Dasse was right behind at 58-5 1/4.

Doehring, who has persevered through several setbacks in his career and shuns attention, finished second at the trials with a throw of 69-2.

Kent Pagel, who coaches his wife, insists it’s no coincidence that San Diego is, or has been, called home by so many athletes in such an obscure sport. Besides these three shotputters, he points out, Brent Noon, who two years ago moved to No. 2 on the all-time National Federation of High Schools list (75-2 with a 12-pound shot), grew up in Fallbrook, and Randy Barnes, the world record-holder (75-10 1/4), also spent time in that North County haven.

Shotputters, like specialists in any field, Pagel theorizes, seek out like-minded cohorts.

“Sometimes you need to be around other people who have your same interest,” Kent said. “Brent Noon came here as a result of Doehring’s being here. When you have a group of people with the same interests, the same goals, it can support you.”

Ramona agreed with her husband, but Dasse wouldn’t buy the company line.

“I think it’s a pure coincidence,” she said. “There’s nothing special about the area to draw athletes. Ramona has done what she has done on her own. I’ve done what I’ve done on my own, and I’m sure Jim’s done that. It has to be coincidence. Back east they have nice indoor facilities, and sometimes I feel like training back east.”

Still, though, Dasse couldn’t argue with Kent Pagel, who coached her back at San Diego State, about the need for support. Part of what kept her going this past year, she said, was her weekly workouts with Ramona.

“It was nice, working with Kent and Ramona this year,” she said. “It was a pretty consistent training schedule since October, and it turned out to be a fun thing. And that was a little surprising because when we first started all I thought was, ‘Gosh, I’m going to have to drive down to San Diego twice a month.’

“But I’ll tell you what--it became something I looked forward to every Saturday, that drive down to San Diego. It was four hours of hard training, and I missed that. It’s focused training, and it’s fun; you enjoy it because you know where it’s going to get you.”

Besides soul mates, there’s one other attraction to San Diego, the obvious one--climate. While most residents boast about the temperature, shotputters boast about the arid air.

“It’s dry here,” Ramona said. “And that’s what shotputters like.”

Dasse can best explain that one through her travails at the trials in New Orleans, where the difference between Southern California and the South is most easily measured by humidity.

“Sometimes I just step into the ring and I can sense it’s going to be a far throw,” Dasse said. “And I had that feeling on my second throw in the finals--except I was sweating. I think I had more of a problem that way than anyone else. I had a towel around my neck, and I whipped it off at the last second, but by the time I got into the ring I was already sweating again. So my second and third throws just slipped right off my neck.”

Dasse never got the 60-foot throw she thought her body could muster, as it had two weeks earlier in a meet in Irvine.

Being from dry Southern California didn’t help Dasse at the trials, and it won’t help either Dasse, 32, or Pagel, 30, in Barcelona. Nothing against San Diego, it’s just that the rest of the world is a generation ahead in women’s shotput.

Pagel’s American record is proof. It’s more than eight feet shy of the world record, 74-3, held by Natalya Lisovskaya of Russia.

And although Lisovskaya, like Pagel, is no longer letting go of throws close to her record, she is still in the high 60s, trying to catch up to two Chinese women who are beyond 70 feet and are beginning to encroach on the world record.

Pagel finished 11th in 1984 at Los Angeles--”But the Soviets weren’t there,” she said--and to make the finals in Barcelona, she will have to conquer a lingering back problem.

“I went to my doctor and he wanted to do an (magnetic resonance imaging) test,” Pagel said. “But I didn’t want to know what it is. I don’t want to know. I have to keep going. If you have a goal, you have to push yourself to the limit. Anytime you want to attain a goal, you do what you have to do to attain it. You can hurt yourself crossing the street, so you might as well be doing something that’s worth getting hurt for.

“I’m 30 years old and my back is feeling like it. It’s just something you have to get used to after a while.”

As of three weeks ago, Dasse said she had yet to set her Olympic goals. It was difficult, she said, because it’s dangerous to set them too low. Yet Americans can’t realistically hope for much.

“For an American,” she said, “making the finals just doesn’t happen.”

Dasse was exaggerating, of course. In 1988 she made the finals in Seoul before finishing 12th overall with a best of 57-9.

That came a day after she reached 63-9 3/4 in qualifying. The drop-off was easily explained.

“I had made the finals,” she said. “And I didn’t have any goals left.”