I fell in love with the Olympic Games around the same time I fell in love with the Baltimore Orioles.
I discovered the Birds in 1966, which, of course, was a magical time for the local boys of summer. The team was amazing and the season culminated in a World Series championship. As a 9-year-old baseball neophyte, I did not quite grasp the rarity of that achievement. I just took winning for granted and the Orioles of the next bunch of seasons did nothing to dispel that notion.
A couple years later, I became aware of the Olympics. The 1968 Winter Olympics were held in Grenoble, France, and the Summer Olympiad took place in Mexico City.
The Neal household was home to a single, 19-inch, black-and-white television that sat camped out on a squeaky, rickety metal stand with wheels (the better to move around in a vain attempt to get better reception).
I remember sitting on the hardwood floor in front of that TV, mesmerized by sporting events I had never witnessed. The skiing, the figure skating, the bobsledding, the ice hockey — I was hooked and I absorbed as much as my mother and my homework demands and household chores allowed.
But more than the sporting events themselves, I remember being drawn in by the concept of this innocent global gathering. I was in elementary school, still participating in duck-and-cover drills as the Cold War raged on. To have an athletic event that gathered the youth of the world to concentrate on peace and brotherhood in amounts equal to competition stuck with me. I have always been a sensitive soul (many still say too sensitive) and my 11-year-old brain was seduced by this concept that prioritized kids as the future hope of the world.
Looking back, I realize how naive that was, and how basically untrue it was even at that time, but I latched on to what I wanted to be my truth.
I don’t remember too many specific results of those first Games of mine, and the memories I do have are probably more media-induced than actual remembrances. I do remember seeing Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their black-gloved fists on the medal podium, but didn’t understand the political significance of it at the time. There were many memorable American athletes, including Al Oerter, Bob Beamon and Dick Fosbury. I would be taught the Fosbury Flop just a couple years later in junior high school.
In France I — along with the rest of the world — fell in love with Jean-Claude Killy. He won all three alpine skiing events (downhill, giant slalom and slalom). I admit to having to look that up. I didn’t remember the results; I just thought he was amazing.
And for the record, Peggy Fleming won the United States’ lone gold medal. Yay women!
Four years later, in 1972, my heart stopped as the Olympic Village was the site of a terrorist attack carried out by members of the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September. Two Israeli athletes were murdered and nine others were taken hostage. Those athletes were all eventually killed by the militants.
So just four short years after discovering the games that were meant to bring the world together in the name of peace and honest competition, that image was shattered all to hell with the unthinkable.
So much has changed within the Olympic movement over the years that it barely resembles that ideal I fell in love with as a sixth-grader. The amateur concept is long dead and buried. College kids who used to dream of the Olympics being the feather in their athletic caps now don’t stand a chance in many of the sports that used to feature them — ice hockey, basketball, soccer, tennis and the like. Professional athletes win Wimbledon one month and Olympic gold the next. Training for the Olympics has become a full-time profession for many, including hundreds if not thousands of kids who train but never make the team.
But in defense of the professional movement, it almost had to happen, if nothing else to level the playing field. When the Olympics were supposed to be an amateur showcase, there were always countries who identified children at very young ages as potential winners, took them from their families and set them up in what were essentially Olympic training camps designed to produce winners. There were the countries that openly paid their “amateur” athletes and those that were notorious for illegal doping to gain unfair advantages. Doping remains an issue but at least the professionalism is out in the open.
The loopholes couldn’t be closed or properly policed so they were cut open for everyone to drive through.
But here is the one thing I do remember most clearly from those early Olympiads. Before I even had an inkling that a journalism career could be on the far-away horizon, I was in awe of the broadcasters. This was the era of ABC being the absolute king of sports broadcasting. The network owned the U.S. Olympic broadcasting rights and also was home to the incomparable Wide World of Sports.
I could have listened to Jim McKay 24 hours a day. He was the face of the U.S. Olympic broadcasts from 1968 through 1988, after initially anchoring the 1964 Innsbruck Winter Games. In 1972, he held the heart of the world in his hands as he remained on the air for 14 hours, trying to keep people as informed as possible throughout the Munich tragedy.
In those early years, women announcers were rare and female anchors were non-existent. Donna de Varona called swimming events. Kathleen Sullivan was named a daytime host for the 1984 Games in Sarajevo and Los Angeles, becoming the first woman in my experience to have such a prominent role. Keith Jackson and McKay hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, as ABC’s reign came to an end. NBC has been the main Olympic broadcaster since the Summer Games in Seoul (the exception being CBS in Nagano in 1998).
So, in letting my memories roam, I see that I am as drawn to the Olympic movement as much for the storytelling as I am the athleticism and the still hopeful philosophy of gathering the world’s youth in peace and brotherhood. I have broadcasting heroes and sports heroes and I’m sure these Milano-Cortina Games will create even more.
I’ll keep you posted.
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