I suppose it was just as well I was out of the room when they exintinguished the torch on the taped version of the closing ceremonies last night. My hope is that in two years, in time for the next games (summer), things will be different in a better way.
My sister Karen, Greg, and I all lamented how we weren’t excited for the Olympics a few weeks ago. I can’t speak for Greg, but for Karen and I, the games were a big deal in our family. I can recall all of us gathered in front of the tv to watch bobsled and figure skating in 1980 at Lake Placid and then track in the summer of 1984 in Los Angeles.
For the past year or so, I’ve been spending more time tracing back in my life where my dreams were born and what inspires me. In a major way, it has been the Olympics. It’s where my unfulfilled running dreams were born, but those dreams taught me about goal setting, dreaming big, working hard, and the idea that we can achieve something we set out to do (although my case it was a long list of things outside of running competitively, but I don’t believe I would have accomplished any of it without dreaming about winning that goal medal in track).
Denise and I watched a lot of Olympics together and in the late 1980s when Mom worked for Midway Airlines, she took us to Colorado Springs to see the United States Olympic Training Center, a place I would spend the summer working as an intern at USA Boxing the summer of 1993, just months after Denise’ suicide.
That summer put me in the thick of our athletes, especially in the cafeteria where we all ate (Bonnie Blair sat behind me one day). I worked the 1996 Atlanta summer games and in 2002, I carried the torch here in Albuquerque as the flame made its way to Salt Lake City.
The Olympic games are a part of the fabric that I continue to weave and call my life. I am saddened by a whole slew of things that have happened, of knowing how many people aren’t excited by them (we found ourselves getting more into them as the eighteen days wore on), and I hope that the changes that need to be made can be made to make them stronger and change them as our society has changed much in recently years. We are in a reckoning with so much and the Olympics are no exception.
Probably what saddened me the most though, was the comment in an article about how much NBC paid for the games, saying how they one had been something that brought us together. That wasn’t the case at all this year, like so many other things.
Still, I hope that in 2024, the rings that have been separated will be glued together stronger than ever. After all, how many other dreams were born through the Olympics besides mine? I hate to imagine life without something that has made such a difference for so many of us.