An Olympic Experience

What is a sport?

The debate among various family members regarding what constitutes a sport started at some point during the 1990s, on a ski trip in eastern Arizona. After expending numerous calories on the mountain’s slopes one day, we returned to our lodging and got cleaned up. Then we elected to acquire sustenance at a steak house located on an off-the-beaten-track two-lane rural road about five miles away.

As for that evening’s discussion, some contended that while football, basketball, and baseball were obviously sports, activities that involved judgment (figure skating, gymnastics, synchronized swimming, and so on) were not sports but were instead competitions.

In disagreeing with this view, others pointed out that there is subjectivity in the officiating that occurs in football, basketball, and baseball. This notion was, I seem to recall, shrugged off by the football-basketball-baseball advocates. 

The discussion on that occasion moved on to consider things like mechanical assistance (is racecar driving a sport?), animal assistance (is horseback riding a sport?), and the nuances between things like downhill skiing (no judging), cross country skiing (no judging), and ski jumping (some judging).

Perhaps the only thing that the original discussion participants could agree on was the contention that any activity in which one’s results were often improved as a result of alcohol consumption could not be a sport. Bowling was cited as a potential example.

Mostly lost in the mists of time was the encounter that subsequently occurred on that profoundly dark rural road. We had just left the restaurant in my relatively new Ford Explorer when I sensed, as much as saw, something moving in the adjacent lane.

I hit the brakes and looked up at the top of the back of a gigantic bull elk who was standing perhaps one car length, or elk length, ahead of us, heading in the same direction. After a moment, he turned in the opposite direction, and we could hear hooves on the pavement for a few moments. I performed a U-turn, and our headlights caught a glimpse of the half dozen rear ends of his female posse heading away. 

In subsequent years, encore versions of our initial conversation often occurred in conjunction with the Olympic games.

I became enamored with the Olympics at age nine when the first televised broadcast of the summer games occurred in 1960. I was particularly drawn to track and field, the events of which enjoyed classification as “sports” some thirty-plus years later during the family’s ski trip summit conference. In more recent years, I’ve enjoyed watching various other summer Olympic sports (competitions in the minds of some family members) and usually lose sleep for a couple of weeks from binge watching the events. This phenomenon now occurs every two years as a result of the alternating summer and winter Olympic schedules. Thank goodness for DVRs.

I experienced the first ten years of life in Upstate New York during the Mickey Mantle–Roger Maris era and should confess that baseball was my first love. I remember going to play catch with my best friend Joe in the spring months when it got up to thirty or forty degrees, because we thought it was warm outside. But then my dad lost his job, and we moved to Arizona so he could join the cash register sales and service business that my mom’s brother and sister had started. In high school, I reasoned that I had a better chance of making the track team than the baseball team, and so my affinity for what is called “athletics” in Olympic parlance increased.

Prior to 1996, I had occasionally yearned to attend the Olympic games. Due to other commitments, attending the relatively nearby 1984 summer games in Los Angeles was out of the question. However, by 1996, when the games were in Atlanta, there were fewer road blocks to deal with. At the time, acquiring tickets seemed like a logical first step prior to attempting to make travel or lodging arrangements. Why would one need travel or lodging if you didn’t have event tickets?    

In the US, opportunities to purchase tickets via a lottery system became available through booklets provided at our nearby Home Depot. I acquired a booklet and spent quite a bit of time analyzing what to request, as prospective buyers were offered a wide array of options. My recollection is that for each day, one could request tickets at various prices for differing sessions (morning, afternoon, evening), and one could designate primary event preferences along with secondary and tertiary backup choices for each session.

At the end of the day, I submitted a request for four of the highest-priced tickets to thirteen sessions of track and field, with no backup choices for any session. I reasoned that if I was going to attend, I wanted to see track and field, I wanted decent seats, and I didn’t want to be shuffled to other events about which I did not have a similar level of interest. Moreover, in a nationwide lottery, what were the chances that I would receive any tickets at all?

Well, as it turned out, the chances were pretty good—I was notified that I had received four tickets at the highest price ($80 each, I think) for eleven of the thirteen sessions of track and field that I had requested. That seemed to be an amazing, perhaps even unbelievable, result from a nationwide lottery system, and I was both happy and excited. Now all I had to do was make some travel and lodging arrangements. That proved to be easier said than done.

My daughters Shelley and Stacey, then twenty-six and twenty-one years old, joined me in the adventure. I subsequently learned that only one of them had brought a toothbrush, and that it took three days before the owner discovered that the appliance was being used by another person. There are some things dads just don’t need to know. The fourth ticket was eventually sold to a business colleague who happened to have a relatively nearby home in Tennessee at that time.

By the time I received Olympic ticket notification, there were no available flights from Phoenix to Atlanta for three people on the days we needed to travel. Due to workplace commitments, cost factors and other considerations, we were not in a position to just go early or stay late, enjoying life as tourists visiting the sites when we weren’t at the games themselves. Ultimately, we flew to and from Birmingham, Alabama, and drove a rental car to Atlanta.    

Securing lodging arrangements proved to be even more difficult. There seemed to be no hotel space available anywhere in or near Atlanta. Or at least none available for less than a million dollars per night. I recall getting panicky as some weeks went by before we were finally able to snag two reasonably priced rooms at the eastern Atlanta metro area home of a friend of a friend of a friend, or maybe it was the cousin of a friend of a friend. I don’t remember.

With all of the major pieces in place (event tickets, transportation arrangements, and lodging), I relaxed and began looking forward to the experience. We traveled to Atlanta on Saturday, July 27, 1996, the same day as the bombing in Atlanta’s Centennial Park. While the attack served to increase security measures for entry to Olympic Stadium, security procedures prior to September 11, 2001, were considerably less stringent than the public safety measures that are common today.

The first of our eleven sessions of track and field occurred on Sunday morning, July 28. As we got to our seats around 9:30 a.m., competitors in the women’s marathon were coming into the stadium. The event had started around 7 a.m., and although all the medalists had already crossed the finish line, we did get to see the finale for many of the event’s sixty-five runners.

Our seats that day were in the stadium’s lower level, somewhere along the straightaway heading toward the finish line. I remember being thrilled about those seats, but as it turned out, those were the only lower-level seats we enjoyed. I remember being disappointed about having paid what I understood to be top dollar for the upper-level seats we occupied during all subsequent sessions.

During the six-day period, Sunday, July 28 to Friday, August 2, we had five days of “double sessions” and just one day with a single session. Morning sessions of track and field began anywhere between roughly 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. each day and continued until the session’s events were completed, generally between noon and 2 p.m. Sometimes the evening sessions began shortly thereafter, in the 4 to 6 p.m. range, and continued until events were completed, usually in the 9 to 10 p.m. ballpark. All morning session spectators were required to exit the stadium, even if you had evening session tickets. So, on each of our five double-session days, we ventured to nearby restaurants and souvenir shops before getting back in the security line for stadium reentry.

The combination of our Olympic event schedule and the location of our lodging resulted in a grind that week. On most days we started at 5 a.m. and didn’t get to bed until midnight or later.

During our time in Atlanta we became acquainted with Olympic pin trading, which we didn’t even know was a thing people did. Initially created to identify the athletes, Olympic pins are designed by people in various countries to commemorate participation in the games, and these items have become collectibles for athletes and fans around the world. Makeshift booths had been established along the main thoroughfare leading to the stadium, and numerous people were buying, selling, and trading Olympic pins. While viewed by some as the unofficial sport of the Olympics, the activity was of course categorized as a competition by us.    

Especially when I’m going from a known Point A to a known Point B, I tend to walk at a pace that some would describe as brisk, and others, including my children, would say is just too fast—in fact, irritatingly too fast. The girls thought that those funny-looking Olympic race walkers had nothing on me. But with the tens of thousands of people milling about that week, little space for such movement was available.

As we were waiting to enter the stadium on one of the days, people standing near us in line were complaining about how hot it was. The temperature was perhaps in the mid-eighties, and while there was some humidity, we weren’t uncomfortable. The complaints did not escape the attention of my girls, who discreetly observed several things.

“This is not hot. They have no idea what hot is.”

“Yeah, hot is when you try to open your car door and burn your fingers.”

“Yeah, hot is when you try to put on a seat belt and suffer second degree burns.”

“Yeah, hot is when you have to wear gloves in order to use the steering wheel.”    

While I have experienced the always-wet-feeling misery associated with high temperatures and high humidity levels in summer season climates similar to that in Atlanta, it is not uncommon for people living in the greater Phoenix metro area to enjoy thirty or more days of 110-plus temperatures during the summer. Perhaps folks in Arizona just define hot differently than people who live elsewhere.

We utilized the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) system as the means of commuting to and from our accommodations to the Olympic venue each day. Our morning MARTA experiences were relatively pleasant. Boarding the eastern end of the line, we always had seats, and while the train became crowded after pausing at various stops on the way to downtown, not everyone attending Olympic events that day wanted or needed to be on the same train.

Our evening MARTA experiences were perhaps less idyllic. At that time of day, many of those attending track and field—and on some nights Olympic baseball games being simultaneously played at nearby Fulton County Stadium—were heading to the same downtown MARTA station at the same time. Sometimes we had to wait for two to three trains before we could squeeze onto one with the other sardines. The three of us were typically separated in slightly different spots on the same train car, standing, leaning, seated, whatever we could get.

And while people from Phoenix don’t sweat or stink in moderate summer season conditions (mid-eighties with some humidity), other people do. Each night one or more of the three of us enjoyed being positioned very close to the armpit or rear end of some other passenger. Some mouth breathing may have been conducted by various members of our party on those occasions, and we took turns enjoying each other’s predicaments.

Regarding the events themselves, among numerous highlights, while we certainly enjoyed seeing Carl Lewis win his fourth consecutive gold medal in the long jump, plus Michael Johnson’s world record setting 200- and 400-meter gold medal performances, the men’s Olympic high jump competition that we witnessed on our first evening in the stadium made a lasting impression on me. World record holder and reigning Olympic champion Javier Sotomayer of Cuba, the only human who has ever jumped eight feet, was favored. However, an ankle injury limited his participation, and he finished twelfth among the fourteen finalists. 

Although we were in the upper deck, we were at the end of the stadium where the high jump competition was occurring, and we witnessed every successful jump, every miss, and every decision to pass that each athlete made. So, for us, there was quite a bit more drama unfolding than the snippets of high jump competitions offered during most television broadcasts of the sport.    

The competition started at 2.15 meters (just north of seven feet for us Americanos in the audience), and the bar was raised in declining .05, .04, .03, and finally .02 meter increments as the event proceeded. Only three men cleared 2.35 meters (seven feet, eight and a half inches)—Charles Austin of the United States, Artur Partyka of Poland, and Steve Smith of Great Britain. At the next height, 2.37 meters (seven feet, nine inches), while Austin and Smith both missed twice, Partyka cleared on his second attempt.

At that point, Austin (with two) and Smith (with four) had more misses than Partyka (just one miss at that time). Consequently, Austin and Smith needed to jump higher than Partyka in order to win, so both elected to pass their third attempts at 2.37 meters in favor of each taking his one remaining attempt at 2.39 meters (seven feet, ten inches).

While I don’t remember who jumped in what order, Smith missed to finish third with the bronze medal, Partyka missed, and Austin cleared to a rousing ovation from those of us in the stands.

Facing the same dilemma and having really nothing to lose at that point, Partyka then passed and made two attempts at 2.41 meters (seven feet, nearly eleven inches). When he failed to clear the height, Partyka earned the silver medal, which became a companion to the bronze he had secured in the same event in Barcelona four years earlier.

Having won the gold medal, Charles Austin made three attempts at a world record 2.46 meters (eight feet and nearly one inch.) that evening. While none of those attempts was successful, the 6 ft. ½ in. tall athlete won America’s first gold medal in the event since Dick Fosbury flopped his way to the top of the podium in 1968. We were thrilled by the—should I say it?— uplifting performance. No American has won the Olympic high jump since then, and as of this writing, the 2.39-meter jump stands as the Olympic record.

Like most vacation weeks, those days in Atlanta raced by, and before we knew it, the intensity of our Olympic experience was over and we returned to our more calm, routine lives in Arizona’s unquestionably hot summer season climate. And while our good-natured debate about what constitutes a sport only occasionally resurfaces, I think that a new candidate for the discussion needs to be considered—Olympic games attendance. There’s a great deal of competition involved (spots in parking lots, spots in lines, seats on planes, and seats on trains), plus substantial amounts of movement in close quarters, lots of unwanted bodily contact, and a significant amount of endurance during a multi-day period.

I find myself compelled to conclude that just attending an Olympic games is a sport in and of itself, and maybe I’ll enjoy two votes of agreement during our family’s next summit conference discussion.