Sultans Of SWAT

"Wrong event, pal!" said Paul Davis, O'Connor's business associate. "This isn't 'Take Out Your Partner.' "

Bob Ramsey, the sportscaster who will do the narration for the ESPN show, laughed and suggested a new way to make money off this event: "Sell body armor to the spectators."

The wayward shot will never be mentioned in the ESPN show. "We don't show the bad stuff," O'Connor explained. "These are our guys and if a guy looks like a total stupid fool, we don't use that. We don't hang 'em out to dry."

Apparently, reality sometimes gets a bit too real for reality TV.

"Get the body!" screamed the fans from Sunnyvale, Calif. "Get the body!"

The Sunnyvale team had lots of fans, most of them wives of the Sunnyvale team, many of them blond and windswept in the classic California Girl style. They were very popular with the members of all the SWAT teams, who are, as Davis put it, "marinated in testosterone."

"Get the body!" they yelled. "Get the body!"

The Sunnyvale team earned its place in the SWAT Challenge by winning the "Best of the West" SWAT games last September. At the moment, its members were competing in the Stress Course event, which required them to push a pickup truck through 100 yards of a sandy field, climb walls, jump hurdles, fire their AR-15 rifles at targets, then carry "Rescue Randy" -- an amazingly lifelike, man-size 165-pound dummy -- back to the pickup. But they dropped poor Randy going over the hurdles, sending him sprawling.

"Get the body!" the fans yelled. "Go! Go! Go!"

The Sunnyvale cops picked Randy back up. They hauled him over the hurdles, they pushed him over the fence, and then they sprinted to the pickup and tossed him into the truck bed in a manner that would have killed him if he were actually alive.

After that, they slumped to the ground, gasping for air and looking almost as battered as Randy.

The World SWAT Challenge has eight events, each one more grueling than the last, and each of them named for its sponsor, usually a company that makes SWAT-related equipment. For instance, the event requiring contestants to rappel down a wall and into an open window before shooting a sniper rifle at moving targets 100 yards away was called Bushmaster High Angle Hell, named after the Bushmaster rifle, which became famous in 2002 when it was used by John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the infamous Washington snipers, to kill nine people.

The games were designed to approximate the actual activities SWAT teams perform on the street: raiding houses, busting down doors, chasing fugitives, rescuing hostages and, if absolutely necessary, shooting a bad guy in a crowd at long range. All the running in these events was designed to get a competitor's heart racing as it does in moments of high stress.

"It puts a little stress on you so you can see how you'll perform under stress," said Adam Powell, 38, of the Washington SWAT team, "because it gets stressful in those situations."