BARCELONA ’92 OLYMPICS / DAY 7 : SUMMER GAMES SPOTLIGHT : ALBANIA GETS ITS $1.25 WORTH

The last-place finisher in the third heat of the 50-meter freestyle swim Thursday morning was Frank Leskaj of Albania. He finished in 24.72 seconds, 50th out of 75 swimmers in the race. That was the end of his Olympics, and the end of a longer journey than anyone might imagine.

Last February, Leskaj was sitting in the living room of his family’s home in Philadelphia, where he swims for LaSalle University. He heard Tim McCarver say on CBS that many Americans compete on foreign Olympic teams.

“I wondered if I could do that,” he said to his mother. Both his grandparents were born in Albania. So he made some calls.

Sure, love to have you, said the Albanians, and so began Leskaj’s odyssey. He made contact with the Albanian Olympic Committee, and it arranged for him to come to the country July 10.

“I knew I would need to work out, so I asked if there were pools. They said, ‘sure, two 50-meter pools, a diving pool.’ They said we would stay in Albania until July 19.”

So Leskaj arrived there and found the Albanians weren’t coming to Barcelona until July 24. No problem: He would work out.

“The pools were beautiful,” he said. “But they didn’t have any water in them. The diving well, which was 15 feet across, had water, but no filtration. I couldn’t see the bottom. I didn’t want to see the bottom.”

He swam in the dirty diving well. He swam in the Adriatic Sea. The Albanians gave him a meal stipend, which was $1.25--total. He met a cousin who drives a cab and makes “two-fifty a week . . . that’s two dollars, fifty cents.”

As odd as all this was, Leskaj found himself struck by the nation, with its beauty and its poverty.

“People get up and drink all day, then go to bed,” he said. “There are burned-out cars everywhere and garbage in the street. It’s terrible. They need someone to help them, to buy land and build up the country.”

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.