LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 7/9/08
TRIUMPH, HEARTBREAK, THE DRAMA GOES ON
It's been six years since the Olympics were in America; a hard-to-believe time span that now seems like another dimension. For me, that time began in 1995, with the momentous announcement by the IOC that the 2002 Winter Games would go to Salt Lake City and I became, again, an Olympic reporter.
I learned stories of inspirational triumphs and heart wrenching tragedies that make up the untold tale of every Olympics.
Like the athlete whose goal from the age of two was to be an Olympian, and who made the team, whose lifelong dream was coming joyously true, until he broke his leg two weeks before the Games. Another athlete lost in a state of wonder as she won and won and won, amazed at something she had never expected, and for an actual unreal moment, when bending her head to have the gold medal hung around her neck, flashed that maybe it wasn't real, maybe she was in a dream from taking magic mushrooms that time. Or the decathlete whose parents were both Olympians, who raised him all his life to be their legacy, and when he didn't make it at the Trials, they kicked him out of the house and told him never to speak to them again.
There are so many dramas. If it could be done, a reality show (which would have to be five or ten years in the making) might tell a few of the stories, though not all, because there are so many stories surrounding every sport in every country. In this Olympics, BMX racer Arielle Martin will sit and watch, while her husband serves out another day in Afghanistan. Maybe. Not for sure. This drama is still playing out.
BMX for men and women debuts in Beijing. Martin was the top woman BMX racer in America, but she fell in the Trials, and her close rival and friend Jill Kintner beat her by one point. The Trials were also the World BMX Championships, so Martin's fall cut the number of U. S. slots down to one. So instead of Arielle and her husband each wearing different uniforms of their country in Beijing, Arielle is the alternate. But wait! On her blog, she writes, "No word yet on a possible 2nd women’s position but the door is still open. I’m training hard as the alternate with the full intent on competing and that’s about all I can do at this point."
Desire and luck and circumstance is what makes up this, the oldest human event, older than any religion, older than most countries, 3,000 years old. Having been to the summer and winter Olympics both as a volunteer and a reporter, I know that there is a strange kind of, I don't know what else to call it but magic, at the Olympics. The very air vibrates with something strange and mystical. It doesn't matter whether you are an athlete or a score keeper, the atmosphere of the Games is like a bubble outside of time. It truly is not of this world. But to be a reporter, to watch the dramas as they develop and unfold, is a lifetime gift. When the Salt Lake City Olympics were coming to a close, and all the stories had finally played out, I thought, "I know all of the dramas, watched them from the beginning. Now they are done, each one worthy of a book or a film on its own, but no one will ever write about them, no one will ever know about all of them." I was astonished at this.
Just as reporters in Beijing will be astonished to realize all the wonderful stories, better than the nightly news, are now over, and there is no way they can ever be told. But oh, the stories they could tell!
Wina Sturgeon, Editor