Memories of a lifetime. There are so many being made at the Olympics in Rio right now that everyone will take back something special to their home country, whether they win gold or fail to advance past the first event.
Sure, winning is the goal but it’s not everything, and that’s what makes the Olympics special. Take out the outrageous cost — and not just in monetary terms — to host the Games, and whether or not professionals should be participating, and if there’s a bigger underlying problem with doping than just the Russians. Once you break it down, the Olympics are about coming together on the biggest global stage to represent your home country. Putting everything on the line, no matter how good the athlete, more often than not creates unique bonds, and sometimes rivalries, in the competition arena each night, whether live or “curated” as content that makes only NBC executives (read: bookkeepers) happy.
But it’s not just the athletes who come home, where ever that may be, and carry around special recollections for decades. Everyone who is lucky enough to have contact with the Games, whether from center stage, backstage or in the stands, has the ability to take away incomparable memories. I should know after spending three weeks at the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996.
Back then, just how big of a deal it was to be at the Games never dawned on me. There were more than 8.3 million tickets sold to events that year and my volunteer job as a Press Steward got me in and out of the Georgia Dome and Georgia World Congress Center at will. It was just living in the moment in the venues by day and all around downtown Atlanta at night.
All told, my time working was spent mostly as a photo marshal, keeping the photographers in their assigned areas at events like weightlifting, Greco and freestyle wrestling and table tennis. That task wasn’t always easy, mainly because of the language barrier. The photogs at the weightlifting venue especially liked to push us, as it was pretty obvious they spoke way more English than they let on, but we did our job and they did theirs.
It all worked, and it was thrilling to be up close to watch “Pocket Hercules” do his thing. In fact, read the fourth paragraph of his Wiki bio and you’ll understand why everyone wanted to be so close, to be there as history unfolded before our eyes. Being just feet away from that level of competition, even in a sport unfamiliar with my background, it swallowed me up in the moment. Simply breathtaking.
My time in Atlanta was also spent writing a bi-weekly column for a small newspaper back in Iowa. Over the previous year, my need to get experience writing led me to working for the paper’s sports section, covering high school and college sports in the area, and the sports editor asked me to provide original Olympics content once he found out my plans to volunteer. It was my last assignment in Iowa as after my return, my life took a turn with a move to southern Illinois to start an internship at SIU, one that led to a 17-year career in college athletics.
With a camera and notepad in hand, my little blue car lit off for the ATL. It was dizzying as it often is when traveling to a new city, especially one the size of Atlanta. On top of the normal residents, add about 2 million visitors from around the world and you have stories that practically wrote themselves. To this day, the memories are still fresh for watching the kids having so much fun in the water fountains in Centennial Park, or how hot it was at baseball, or the lines and craziness of packing so many people into the trains. And all the medals ceremonies, so many ceremonies. Sometimes it was my observations from the volunteer job — like escorting the gold medal winners at judo through the mixed media zone for interviews — that were used to write the column for my paying job.
The city had a special vibe, one of coming together, of everyone being friends. Or at least it seemed that way when we went out at night. There were many occasions where we — my housing was provided by a buddy from college who moved to Atlanta a couple years before, and my best friend from back home came down to indulge — were out for a beer and would end up talking with people from Germany or Slovenia or Chile, or all three, all within one round. And we typically had several rounds each night.
Those memories are made stronger every four years with some of the stuff still sitting or hanging today in my house. The tickets to events we paid to see, the pins collected and traded, the pictures taken, and even the articles written. Many of them are framed or put out, although some of the articles and the hockey jersey probably should be put up at some point.
One of my favorite pieces of memorabilia is the beer menu from Three Dollar Cafe. We went there several nights in a row, enough to be friendly with the waitresses and even close the place down a couple times. They sure liked the night we started buying $20 bottles of beer. And the “they” wasn’t just the waitresses who got tipped, but Visa and Mastercard for the amount of money spent in Atlanta.
One night late in the first week, we even got them to serve us after closing time and let us keep drinking as we offered to sweep and put up the chairs. Hey, don’t judge. We were young and thirsty. And we were young guys at that, so there was always the need to get some phone numbers, like Karla, one of the waitresses at Three Dollar. She even almost convinced me to put off heading home for a week and instead freewheel down to Key West. My travels still haven’t taken me there yet, but maybe someday.
When we weren’t at Three Dollar, we spent plenty of time downtown. It’s still surreal to think we were just there the night of the bombing in Centennial Park. We had been drinking a couple blocks off the Park — and for some reason my memory says we were hanging with some random German and Belgian fans we met that night — and walking around, then began heading home about 11:30 p.m. to get a little sleep before my 7 a.m. shift began. By the time we got off the train and headed home 90 minutes later, we saw the first news reports soon after we got in the door.
Despite the obviously disappointing display of humanity, it was overshadowed in the end by the universal camaraderie we encountered. That fun we had with so many people from other countries reached a pinnacle when we drove over to Birmingham, Ala., for the quarterfinals of men’s soccer. Nigeria and Mexico played, and my recollection did not indicate which team won, so Wikipedia had to be researched, leading me to see that Nigeria earned 2-0 victory and went on to win the gold medal.
What my memory does include is such a good time had by everyone. They were fierce in their loyalty to their country and team, and in the stadium it was palpable the feeling that you couldn’t be neutral. Once the game ended, everyone was on the same side. It was just one big party, one that extended into the two-hour long traffic jam getting out of the parking lot and onto the highway. Even there on the road, with everyone moving at a turtle’s pace, the Mexicans were ribbing the Nigerian fans and the Nigerians were giving it back. And they were hugging, and singing, and drinking. More than one beer made it from a nearby car into ours (it may or may not have been my first time drinking Tecate), and we had great conversations with fans from each side for quite a while until we finally could get traffic going normal speed.
It’s still fun to take out the pictures, tickets and pins, bringing back the memories and reminiscing. Chances are that that was my only Olympic experience. A medal didn’t come home and it’s unlikely that my athletic career will ever take off, but my Olympic memories are golden to me and that’s what the Games really should be about, letting everyone shine in their own way.
Six-7 Offsuit 
Well said, it is the moments that make the memories.
If only the people of the world knew each other as you described above, pretty sure a good deal of this worlds troubles would fade away.