Fun and Games
The Olympics will begin Friday in France. For the first time in a long while, I'll be watching from home.
Well, it looks like they’re going to stage the Olympic Games without me. I know. How dare they?!
Not that I thought they couldn’t. The Olympics were held long before I became a sportswriter, and they will continue long after I’ve stopped typing and sharing thoughts on one platform or another.
But covering the Olympics had become a big part of my life and career. And although the Games have become ever bigger and more difficult to cover, they were always rewarding and often exhilarating to witness and to write about.
Amateurism is gone and the number of sports has probably reached the saturation point, but there’s still something noble about watching runners, basketball players, gymnasts, swimmers, water polo players, rowers, wrestlers, and so many other athletes setting goals and dedicating their lives to training for a chance to win Olympic gold while wearing their nation’s colors. Staying a step ahead of drug cheaters will always be a challenge, but it’s worth the effort.
After having covered 18 Olympics altogether—including every Winter and Summer Games consecutively starting with 1998 in Nagano, Japan—it feels odd to be reading about the preparations and pitfalls and anticipated highlights of this summer’s Games and know I won’t be there to write about them when they open on Friday in Paris. It’s time for me to pass the Olympic writing torch. But I plan to share my thoughts on Substack from home once things begin and stories develop.
My first Games were the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid in 1980, while I still worked for Newsday. You might remember a couple of hockey games that were played there. Here’s my souvenir mascot doll from Lake Placid. For some reason, I remembered him being named Rocky, but he was Roni.
I also worked for Newsday at the 1984 Winter Games in Sarajevo, in what was then Yugoslavia. Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s stunningly perfect ice dance performance to Ravel’s “Bolero” remains an indelible memory. Here, from my collection, is 1984 mascot Vucko, who sadly lost an eye somewhere along the way.
And here’s 1988 mascot Howdy, who was paired with another mascot named Hidy, though she seems to have disappeared over the years.
At Newsday and later the L.A Times, I covered winter sports before an editor finally realized I wouldn’t melt during the summer and I was assigned to the 2000 Sydney Summer Games. This wasn’t the official Sydney mascot but he was popular:
Sydney 2000 and London 2012 remain my favorite Summer Games. Sydney, for the relaxed atmosphere and friendly Aussies, and for the drama of 400-meter runner Cathy Freeman becoming the first aboriginal Australian to win an individual Olympic gold medal. The pressure on her was enormous, but she was victorious.
London was memorable because of the history at so many venues, and because of a daily commute from the hotel to the press center that took us past the Tower of London. Slightly more picturesque than the 405. And for Los Angeles’ own Allyson Felix, whom I had covered quite a bit, finally winning gold in the 200-meter race after twice winning silver.
Again, an unofficial souvenir was my favorite:
Special bonus: the Queen waves, because she’s solar-powered (thanks to a small panel on her purse).
What turned out to be my last two Olympics, the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Summer Games and the 2022 Beijing Winter Games, were staged under heavy COVID restrictions. In Tokyo, this is what the mixed zone (the area where athletes speak to the media) looked like when the U.S. women’s gymnastics team came through. Reporters handed their voice recorders to Olympic media assistants, who gathered them in baskets and placed them near the athletes.
Even the mascot who kept us company in our LA Times Beijing office was properly masked:
It would take too long to write about my memories of each Games, though I might dig into those once the Games begin and the Olympic spirit strikes. First, I must find photos of my now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t shower curtain from the 2014 Sochi Games.
There will be many compelling story lines to follow in the coming weeks. After watching Simone Biles’ struggles at the Tokyo gymnastics competition, I’m eager to see how she does in Paris. I’m prepared to debate any critic who claims she quit on the U.S. team when she withdrew from the team and all-around events, as well as several individual events in Tokyo as the result of prolonged physical and emotional stress. You try leaping 12 feet into the air, as Biles did during her floor exercise routine at the U.S. Olympic trials, while feeling uncomfortable and unsure about where and how you’ll land. She would have risked severe injury if she’d continued. She returned for the balance beam final and won a bronze medal that felt like gold to her.
After taking some time off, she returned to competition in the summer of 2023 and picked up where she’d left off, once again becoming the world’s best female gymnast. Whether she can return to gold-medal form will be one of the biggest questions of these Olympics. She’s still pulling off tougher vaults and moves than most other female gymnasts dream of doing.
American sprinter Noah Lyles’ quest for supremacy in the sprint double—gold in the 100- and 200-meter dashes—figures to earn a lot of attention. The 100 is a classic race, the essence of the Summer Games and always one of the most dramatic.
Another story will center on the superstar-studded U.S. men’s basketball team, which raised eyebrows when it barely squeaked out a win over South Sudan in a pre-Olympic exhibition last weekend. When the real games begin, though, expect them to be ready.
Also certain to grab attention in what has become a booming era for women’s sports is the U.S. women’s basketball team, which is seeking its eighth straight Olympic gold medal. The U.S. women lost a pre-Olympic exhibition to a team of WNBA All-Stars last Saturday, but the U.S. women’s team for the Tokyo Games also lost a pre-Olympic matchup against the WNBA All-Stars and went on to an easy triumph. There’s no reason to expect anything different in Paris.
Let the Games begin. I’m ready to soak it all in from a different vantage point.
Fun seeing the mascots you have! How do you like the Paris one? I’m excited to see Paris as the backdrop for this Olympics.
Fantastic article as usual. I would love to hear more about what it was like to be in the arena in 1980 for the US-Soviet game. That would be an amazing article to read. For me basketball and hockey lost most of its Olympic excitement when they started to allow the professionals to participate. I have never gotten past that. Thanks again