Olympics Past

Snowboarding is definitely an exciting addition to the Olympics. But in games past, they also had cool sports. Some of these obsolete sports include standing high jump, standing broad jump, and standing triple jump, One-Hand Lift, Roque, Plunge for Distance, 1-mile freestyle, trapshooting and the tug-of-war. I think it would be cool to bring back trapshooting if for no other reason than Dick Cheney could qualify.

But I have a special fondness for the Winter Olympics. In 1992 I attended the games as a VIP guest of Kodak and Sports Illustrated at the Albertville Olympics in France.

Well, maybe I was just a VIP in my mind as I do remember riding a bus for what seemed like multiple hours from the valley of Albertville up to my hotel at Courchival 1880 each day. Once, while I was skiing, I remember looking down upon the helicopter carrying Super G primo Alberto Tomba. Now that I think back, he was the VIP...

Those Olympics were especially exciting because the Soviet Union had just fallen. The Soviet team, complete with their obsolete “CCCP” gear, spent the Olympics selling their jersey’s, hats, and other memorabilia to us westerners. You can see from the picture above that I was happy to partake in their newfound capitalism.

It was also an important Olympics because I got to eat in the same pizza parlour as Charles Kuralt. See, I grew up watch good ole’ Charles on Sunday mornings on one of the three channels we received in Moose Lake Minnesota. He used to drive around in an old Winnebago and report on odd events in far flung places. Kinda like my blog.

I think ol’ Charles spent most of his time consuming pizza in the only pizzeria in town, along with Olympians like Scott Hamilton. Charles looked a bit like Jabba the Hut, even at that time, although he didn’t die of congestive heart failure later, until 1997.

I even fell in love during those Olympics. I was enthralled with a girl from Bulgaria. Bulgarian girls were still somewhat scary at that point as the Iron Curtain had just fallen and my previous exposure had consisted of steroid-dropping weight-lifters. But she was beautiful and we were in a wonderful place, us and Charles. Although, my Olympics dreams rapidly came to a close when late one night she told me that her boyfriend, who was in the Bulgarian Secret Police, was out doing “mountain training” with the French Gendarme. I left shortly after that, and quickly, for my 6am train.

Olympics past…