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He Can Turn Paris Into the Quad City

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Roberto Carlos, the Thighmaster of international soccer, was out walking his twins Friday.

Righty and Lefty, you can call them. Inseparable since birth. They come out to play every time Carlos dresses them in the blue and white shorts of Brazil’s national team--a pair of holy terrors that sometimes even Carlos is unable to control.

They are not Carlos’ children, of course, not in the traditional sense.

They are his thighs.

More awesome to behold than a Ronaldo one-on-one break.

More imposing than Dunga the Destroyer, the rather irritable Brazil captain with the spiked haircut and the personality to match, getting in the face of a nervous World Cup rookie.

Carlos’ quads are big enough to warrant their own jersey numbers. Put No. 6 on his back, give the thighs 7 and 8. They are tape-measure jobs in themselves--each of them 35 inches in circumference.

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Were they actually individually functioning humans, Carlos’ thighs would have a larger waistband than perhaps any player in the World Cup. He must be great to have around on team camp-outs. Denilson gets one leg of his sweatpants, Rivaldo gets the other, no need to bring sleeping bags.

They are quite the quad couple, Carlos’ thighs, and they have been popular topics of discussion leading up to Sunday’s World Cup final between Brazil and France. The last time the French saw them--in a 1997 exhibition tournament, Le Tournoi de France--those massive muscles conspired to strike what has been called the Greatest Free Kick Ever.

Superlatives are dangerous in any sport, especially in soccer, where some mind-boggling set-piece could have gone down on some ragged patch of grass in Burkina Faso and never quite made the Worldwide Soccer highlight reel.

But all of soccer is in agreement on this one.

Against France in Lyon on June 3, 1997, Roberto Carlos crashed a free kick past Fabien Barthez that has, and might forever have, no equal.

The ball was spotted roughly 30 yards outside the France goal. Building up a head of steam by sprinting in from the midfield center circle, Carlos struck the ball with the outside of his left foot, sending the ball bending initially toward the right corner flag.

Barthez assumed the shot was well off line and stopped to watch it. Photographers assembled around the France goal ducked for cover.

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Then, in the blink on an eye, the ball torqued hard to the left--completing one nasty backward-S curve--and hooked over the head of a startled Barthez into the upper-right corner of the net.

If you’ve never seen it on videotape, try to imagine Tim Salmon spraying one foul up toward the View level, only to have the ball switch gears just before little Johnny can glove a souvenir and wind up tucking itself inside the right-field foul pole.

Barthez has been asked about the free kick, probably a few times too many, this week.

“There was strictly nothing I could do,” Barthez says. “But I don’t want to think about it too much.

“The best thing to do would be to make sure Roberto Carlos does not get a free kick this time.”

When Carlos is asked about the kick, he delights in assuring reporters that it was simply another day at the office.

“I’ve scored goals like that before,” Carlos said before the World Cup. “I scored a better one for Real Madrid earlier this season, further out and more to the left.

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“But I suppose the free kick against France was special. No one thought it would go in, but I did. I don’t see why I can’t score another one like that.”

Say, Sunday evening at Stade de France, with Barthez in the nets again and the 1998 World Cup on the line?

“I have one last chance and I’m not going to waste it,” says Carlos, who has yet to break into the scoring column in this tournament and is none too happy about it.

He blames the ball.

“My secret weapon is the swerve and spin I can put on those kind of kicks,” he says, “but the ball is so light, it is extremely hard to curve it in. . . .

“That kind of free kick is one of my favorite weapons, but I have been completely ruined by this ball because it is far too light.”

Barthez has been talking tough, downplaying the rematch at Saint-Denis, saying, “I think Brazil will be much more worried about the free-kick ability of [France midfielder] Zinedine Zidane than we will be about the talent of Roberto Carlos.”

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Carlos, meanwhile, merely taps his mighty quad and reports, “I have been working hard in practice. Who knows what might happen on Sunday?”

Who indeed.

But you know what they say when it comes to pounding a soccer ball into or over a human wall so hard, so forcefully, that it leaves the opposing goalie grasping at air while the back of the net bulges and ripples:

Thighs matters.

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