SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS : HE’S A HUMAN JACK OF WEIGHTLIFTING TRADE

Among the more interesting athletes on the U.S. Olympic team is Mario Martinez, super-heavyweight weightlifter from Salinas, Calif., who was second in the 1984 Olympics and fourth in 1988 and who is the self-proclaimed “only real hope” for the United States to win a weightlifting medal.

Among the things that separate Martinez, 35, from the other athletes are:

--He weighs 308 pounds and plans to diet to 242 in a couple of months:

“I’ve done that twice before, and I’ll do it again. Mostly, I just cut out the red meat and drink low-cal milk. It’s not all that comfortable being this big, you know.”

--He might be the only Olympic athlete anywhere who works a 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift:

“I work at San Francisco International Airport for Budget Rental Car, and I’ve been doing that for the last 11 years. My coach calls me the strongest working man alive. He also calls me weightlifting’s Nolan Ryan. I’ve got a few Russian competitors who are subsidized all the way, have their own workout coaches and even their own masseuse. It’s a little tough to compete with that.”

--He is certainly the only rental-car employee anywhere who doesn’t only rent cars, but also occasionally lifts them:

“I’d say the easiest are Dodge Colts, but one time, if memory serves me, I got the back end of a Lincoln Town Car off the ground.”

--He wants people to understand the difference between weightlifters, who train for strength, and body builders, who he said train for cosmetics:

“These body builders are like a Corvette with a Volkswagen engine.”

--And he wants everybody to know, while weightlifting is testing more and more for use of banned drugs, that the situation in the 1988 Olympics that resulted in two champions from Bulgaria losing their gold medals remains an embarrassment to his sport:

“There are still plenty of moves and countermoves in this drug stuff. They caught some people in Seoul, but I assure you, some more got through without getting caught.”

This a daily roundup of Olympic-related items from reporters in Barcelona from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant, all Times-Mirror newspapers.