Monthly Archives: February 2010

Today was the most beautiful spring day yet. To celebrate, Lindsay and I went running. Seven miles around the waterfront. That’s a new personal record since I started running again recently. I guess hanging around all these Olympic athletes is inspiring me!

And I think an Olympic athlete also inspired the city planner. If Pittsburgh is the City of Bridges, Vancouver is the City of Stairs. Tomorrow, I am going to count how many stairs I climb in the course of an average day. There are easily 80 to and from the Skyway and around 200 to get to the halfpipe at Cypress (and I do that several times a day). It is impossible to walk more than a few blocks without being confronted by at least a small set of stairs. This place forces you to exercise like no city I’ve visited.

I feel like a new person today. It is amazing what a good night’s sleep and a shower will do for a person.

This morning, women’ snowboardcross finals were delayed because of rainy conditions and heavy fog at Cypress Mountain. It seems Mother Nature may never cooperate with the Olympic event schedule, which is unfortunate. (For everyone but Lindsey Vonn and her shin, that is. Today, my story on the outpouring of home remedy suggestions for Lindsey Vonn’s ailing shin was one of the top stories on ESPN.com. To check it out, click here.) It also brings up the question of whether the Olympics should choose a few venues to rotate between, like the NFL does with the Super Bowl, or one permanent venue like the X Games does, and stick with it. Cities where there is — oh, I don’t know — snow in the winter.

Happy President’s Day!

Today’s wakeup call was an early one. Is this really only day four of competition? I think I’m going to have to switch to the dark roast at Tim Horton’s.

Looking back on this morning, I don’t remember much. I was so blind tired that I can only vaguely recall getting ready and dressed and I have only limited memory of the bus/subway/bus rides I took to arrive at Cypress Mountain in time for the first snowboardcross time trials at 10 a.m. That explains, however, why I chose to wear athletic socks inside of my Sorrels instead of warm snowboard socks, why I am wearing only one shirt under my jacket and why I did not bring a hat with me at all.

[Editor's note: Due to Early Onset Exhaustion, today's entry is going to be brief.]

It’s only Day six and already the Olympics is taking its toll. As I write this Sunday night, I am exhausted. And today wasn’t even a tough day!

This morning, I slept in until 8:30 and then stole some morning me-time. If I haven’t mentioned it before, Lindsay and I are staying at the swanky Coast Hotel, which is conveniently located just a few miles from the lovely Vancouver International Airport. While the rest of the major U.S. media, and pretty much everyone I know who is here in Vancouver for the Olympics, is staying downtown, Lindsay and I are staying what seems like 200 miles away, in a lifeless area of town situated between two highways. It sort of feels like I live in Queens and am covering an event taking place in NYC. First-class all the way.

In the rest of the world, today is apparently Saturday. Which is the first day of a two-day time period called a “weekend.” Here in Olympic world, a day is a day is a day. Weeks are not divided into starts and ends, and hours are not divided–as they typically are–into classifications like “too late to call” or “too early to be awake and writing a story.” The next few weeks will simply blur into one very long day-like aberration called the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Today started with so much excitement and promise. The official start of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

But it was marred by tragedy. This morning, Georgian luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili died after crashing violently in a training run. It was heartbreaking news, and the saddest part of the crash was that it feels like it could have been prevented. Several luge athletes have crashed in training runs over the past week, including the 2002 and 2006 men’s gold medalist. A female athlete was knocked unconscious in a training crash. Another said she felt like a “lemming” being thrown down the track without concern for her safety. Yet, the race must go on.

Happy Olympics Eve, everyone!

Today was a long one, as I am writing this at 2 a.m. I spent the morning cooped up in my hotel room doing phone interviews, and the afternoon cooped up in the media center at press conferences. But today was a good day to spend indoors. Because it rained all day.

This evening, I rode to an Oakley media event and fashion show at Grouse Mountain with my friends Gretchen Bleiler–a snowboarder competing here in Vancouver–and Amy Stanton–her agent–and wrote a story about what a day in Gretchen’s Olympic life is like. And let me tell you, it is much different from that of most Olympic athletes. Gretchen is one of the busiest girls I know. And she wouldn’t have it any other way.

This morning, Lindsay and I drove to Whistler to check into the condo we’ll be using while we’re in the mountains covering the alpine (skiing) and sliding (luge, bobsled, skeleton) events. On the two-hour drive up the newly reconfigured highway, we waited … and waited … and waited … to catch our first glimpse of the white stuff. But other than a few scattered piles of nasty, week-old, side-of-the-highway snow, our drive was as flake-free as my parents’ front yard. (They live in SW Florida. It was cooler there yesterday than it was here in Vancouver.)

Check out my new cover story on snowboarder Shaun White, who I interviewed many times over the past nine months for this piece. Our first interview took place at his secret halfpipe in Silverton, Colorado, in February 2009. Then I sat down with him last fall at a swanky SoHo hotel in New York City and again at each stop along the Grand Prix circuit, where he was competing for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. Check out the story, and a video from the photo shoot here. (If you look closely, you can catch a cameo of me and my sling! That’s also me who Shaun keeps looking off-camera at while answering my questions. Man, I look great on camera!)

Before leaving for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, I wrote a blog expressing how I felt about the opportunity to cover the summer Games. Growing up, I was a gymnast, a catcher/short stop and a sprinter. And like most kids who compete in Olympic sports, I had visions of competing in red, white and blue. But as I got older, reality set in and I realized I was a much better writer than athlete. So, as they say, those who can do. (Or, in my case, did.) And those who couldn’t quite … write.