ATLANTA 1996 / Countdown to the Summer Olympic Games : They Just Might Be the New Nadia, the New Teofilo, Etc. : Summer Games: Moceanu, Mutola, Popov, Savon, Van Almsick are names to remember.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee and Sergei Bubka will be back, but can Carl Lewis cast aside his injuries and illnesses to make a run--and/or jump--for double figures in gold medals? Hakeem the Dream will play for the team named after him, but will Vlade Divac and his Serbian teammates be allowed to play if the war still rages in Bosnia?

After retiring once and for all, Bela Karolyi is again preparing gymnasts, but can former world champions Kim Zmeskal and Svetlana Boguinskaya still compete at that level? Can current world champion Shannon Miller? Steffi Graf wants to be there, but what about Monica Seles? Miguel Indurain?

In the next 12 months, we will learn who will--and who won’t--compete in the 1996 Summer Olympics that begin July 19 at Atlanta. Here’s a look at five you can expect to see:

DOMINIQUE MOCEANU

She is an American gymnast of Romanian descent, will be 14 during the Olympics and trains under Karolyi. If she reminds you of Nadia Comaneci, you are not alone.

“If she puts something in her mind, she’s not going to leave the gym unless she does it,” Comaneci says of Dominique Moceanu. “I was kind of like that too.”

But if she has Comaneci’s desire and even a bit of her raven-haired, dark-eyed looks, Moceanu has the vibrant personality of another former Karolyi gold medalist, Mary Lou Retton. With those qualities, combined with a 4-foot-5, 70-pound body that inspired classmates to call her “Shorty” until they saw her on television, the network’s cameras will not be able to resist her during the Olympics.

If she performs as well as she did in this spring’s Visa Challenge, in which she won the all-around title in only her second senior competition, one of her poses might be from the medal stand.

It seems destined. Her father, Dmitri, a former Romanian national junior gymnast who defected to the United States, called from his home in Florida to ask if Karolyi would train his daughter when she was only 3. Karolyi advised him to wait six or seven years. Dmitri waited six before taking her to Karolyi’s gym in Houston. One year later, at 10, Moceanu became the youngest member ever of the U.S. junior national team.

“She’s going to be one of the great ones,” Karolyi says.

MARIA MUTOLA

Cynicism about the International Olympic Committee comes easily when it spends $16 million to celebrate itself, as it did in last year’s Centennial Congress at Paris. Virtually unnoticed, however, is the IOC’s Olympic Solidarity Fund, which puts athletes from poor countries in environments that allow them to develop.

The most successful beneficiary is Maria Mutola, who since arriving from her native Mozambique at Springfield, Ore., near the running mecca of Eugene, has become one of history’s most dominant female half-milers.

Her aggressive running style might never be described as poetry in motion, but the man who discovered her, Mozambique’s poet laureate, Jose Craveirinha, saw something that appealed to him in the 15-year-old girl who was playing for a boys’ soccer team.

He recommended her to his son, one of the country’s best track coaches, and only three months after she ran her first 800 meters, she carried Mozambique’s flag in the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Summer Olympics.

Four years later, in the Barcelona Olympics, she finished fifth. Virtually unbeatable since, she has won 40 consecutive 800 races, among them world indoor championships in 1993 and ’95 and the world outdoor championship in ’93. Only one woman since 1983 has run faster than her best of 1 minute 55.19 in 1994.

In a society that still does not reward women for performance alone, slower, blonder and less muscular competitors attract more media attention than Mutola, 22, but one of her coaches, Jeff Fund, says, “Maria’s very feminine, she just doesn’t look it.”

ALEXANDER POPOV

Going back even farther than Johnny Weissmuller’s 100-meter victories in 1924 and ‘28, U.S. men have dominated swimming’s sprints in the Olympics. Before 1992, they had won 13 of 21 and five of the last six in the 50 and 100 freestyles.

But Russian Alexander Popov won both races at Barcelona, defeating the men considered until then the fastest in the water, Americans Matt Biondi and Tom Jager, and drawing comparisons to Valery Borzov’s victories in the 100 and 200 in 1972 that broke the United States’ hold on the track sprints.

Popov, 23, has not slowed since. He broke Biondi’s world record in the 100 last year and swept the sprints again in the World Championships. If anyone can beat him at either distance in the Olympics, he has not emerged.

Born in Sverdlovsk, at the foot of the Ural Mountains, Popov was a lazy child whose father had to order him to take swimming lessons. Unfortunately, his father did not tell him which stroke to make his specialty. Until 1990, Popov was a so-so backstroker, ranked 15th in the world in the 100.

Coach Gennadi Touretski converted him, using underwater videos of Biondi to teach the 6-foot-6 Popov the long, smooth stroke that he now uses more efficiently than anyone else.

FELIX SAVON

When Felix Savon was accepted into a Cuban sports school at 13, his mother told him that he could not come home again if he became a boxer. As he tells the story, he went that night to a field at a nearby farm to ponder his decision.

“I fell asleep,” he says. “When I woke up, I was a boxer.”

There has not been a better one over a period of years in amateur boxing, except perhaps for another Cuban heavyweight, Teofilo Stevenson, the only one to have won three Olympic gold medals. Had it not been for Cuba’s boycott of the 1988 Games at Seoul, Savon, 27, almost certainly would be fighting for his third at Atlanta.

Besides winning the gold medal in 1992, the 6-4, 201-pound Savon has won five world championships while compiling a 278-10 record. The accomplishment that pleases him most, however, is his 17-0 record against Americans.

Growing up near the United States’ Guantanamo Naval Base, he developed a hatred for Yanquis .

“It is unpleasant to live in their military presence,” he says.

A committed socialist, he says he will never fight professionally.

“I don’t want to become a professional in Las Vegas,” he says. “If you lose, the Mafia will make a hit on you.”

His mother, incidentally, forgave him, although he says she smokes a pack of cigarettes each time she watches him fight on television.

FRANZISCA VAN ALMSICK

She has been called “the Last Empress” of East Germany’s swimming dynasty, but it is more appropriate to call her the first of unified Germany.

Franzisca Van Almsick certainly was raised under the influence of East Germany’s sports system, the so-called “Miracle Machine.” She was nurtured from age 7 in a special school for young athletes, and her mother was a sports official who admitted in 1993 that she had spied on athletes for the country’s secret police. But Van Almsick was only 11 when the Berlin Wall fell, taking the sports schools with it, and was too young to be involved in the drug scandals that tainted the accomplishments of East German athletes who came before her.

Germans from the East take particular pride in her, claiming she is proof that exceptional athletes can be produced there naturally, but Germans from the West have adopted her.

With lucrative endorsement contracts that earn her about $2 million a year, a nationally televised talk show for which she interviews other celebrities, and a best-selling biography, she is Germany’s most famous, and perhaps richest, 17-year-old. In a recent poll among the country’s teen-agers, she was chosen over Graf as the most popular woman athlete.

Her promise was evident when she won two silver medals and two bronze in the 1992 Summer Olympics, then fulfilled with six gold medals and a silver in the 1993 European Championships. She, like almost everyone else, was overwhelmed by the tidal wave of outstanding Chinese performances in last year’s World Championships, but she still won four medals, including a gold with her world-record performance in the 200-meter freestyle.