CELESTE BERNARD
Four days into the Games, the quality of my Olympic experience hinged on finding a package I needed for deadline and was a day late reaching me.
I went to the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games for help at 12:30 p.m. They said the package had been delivered the previous day and that it should show up within the hour. When it didn’t and the people dispatched to find it had given up and gone home, I began to worry.
As a last-ditch effort, ACOG said I could look for it on my own with a security escort. That’s when I ran into Gladys Andrews. It was 5:30 p.m. She didn’t know where my package was, but she was going to find it. By 7:30 p.m. she knew it wasn’t in the building and sent a courier three hours outside of Atlanta get a replacement package. At 9:30 p.m., Andrews called to see if there was anything else she could do.
I wish I had a gold medal to give her.
– Celeste Bernard, sports graphics coordinator for the Tribune, developed graphics for Tribune newspapers during the Games.
KAREN BRANDON
In a quite informal survey, conducted during my considerable experience as a Centennial Olympic Games cab hopper, I found that the vast majority of taxi drivers in Atlanta hail from Nigeria.
As a result, on the penultimate day of the Olympics I was shocked to find an Ethiopian behind the wheel. “No Nigerians driving today,” he explained. “They all watch soccer.”
If one could judge from the prevalence of “Nigerian Dream Team” T-shirts, the Ethiopian was right. The entire Nigerian cab driving population appeared to have fled for Athens, where the soccer players from their homeland were battling Argentina for the gold medal in men’s soccer.
Vying for attention with the players themselves was one memorable Nigerian fan, seated one row below me. He wore Nigerian green and white on his hat and shirt. A camera dangled from one wrist, but I don’t believe he ever had the opportunity to use it. The right hand firmly grasped a video recorder, the left, a microphone, devices that were in use throughout the game.
Seated or standing, he videotaped, all the while shouting his homespun narration into the microphone. It consisted of one word, spoken over and over. When Argentina controlled the ball, he shouted, “No! No! No!” When the Nigerians controlled the ball, he shouted, “In! In! In!”
That seemed much more eloquent than anything I heard from Bob Costas.
– Karen Brandon, a national correspondent based in Los Angeles, covered Atlanta and the Centennial Olympic Park bombing.
BONNIE DeSIMONE
I knew she was plucky, I knew she was talented, and I knew she was having the meet of her life. But I wasn’t sanguine about Amy Van Dyken’s chances in the 50-meter freestyle on the seventh and last night of swimming competition.
Van Dyken already had three gold medals to her name, two for relays and one out-of-the-blue victory in what was supposed to be her off event, the 100 butterfly. I wondered about her stamina, given the fact that she had been bothered by cramps and dehydration. I wondered about the natural tendency to let down after all those high points.
I already felt as if I had witnessed an athletic miracle. Van Dyken’s severe asthma had brought a lot of unwanted drama into her life. She was the true embodiment of the old saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Watching the fastest swimmers in the world is a little like seeing giraffes lope across the African plains. They look as if they’re moving in slow motion when they are, in fact, covering ground at an incredible pace. My seat high in the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center was on a line about 10 meters from the finish, the exact point at which Van Dyken’s game plan called for her to pull ahead of world champion Le Jingyi of China. The seconds morphed into minutes as Van Dyken churned even with my line of vision, then seemed to glide infinitesimally ahead of Le with three smooth strokes. They hit the wall in a shower of spray and whipped around to look at the scoreboard.
Van Dyken’s expressive face lit up and she thrust one fist in the air. The perfect strokes that brought her home in 24.87 seconds had also made her the first U.S. woman ever to win four gold medals in one Olympiad.
– Bonnie DeSimone covered swimming, softball and women’s soccer.
TIM FRANKLIN
I had just laid my head on the pillow about 1:40 a.m. that Saturday morning when the phone in my apartment pierced the silence. What happened the next few minutes seemed as surreal as a bad dream.
Except in your dreams your throat doesn’t burn from police pepper gas, and your ears don’t hurt from the wailing of dozens of emergency vehicles and the whirring of police helicopters.
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I will never forget the immediate aftermath of the Centennial Park bombing.
There was the terrified emotion of a woman from Winter Haven, Fla., who desperately tried to help victims until paramedics arrived. There was the disbelieving Atlantan who went out for a couple of beers and suddenly found himself lying on the ground with his clothes torn. There was the firm but panic-stricken look of a young soldier trying to help police secure the area.
The images I expected to see at the Olympic Games were of athletes with focused determination, bursting pride, crushing disappointment and unmitigated joy. I saw those images, but they are not the ones I will think of first. Those were just games.
– Tim Franklin, Tribune associate managing editor/sports, coordinated the Tribune’s Olympic coverage.
PHILIP HERSH
He appeared out of the night, out of the past he shared with both the event and the region. When the light caught his dark face, caught it full, the reflection was brighter than the flame Janet Evans handed to him. It was a reflection of the possibilities the Olympics promise and rarely deliver, the possibilities for men and women to be judged by who they are and not how they look.
Muhammad Ali, the final torch bearer at the Opening Ceremony, up there on what seemed a mountaintop, the celestial mountaintop of equality that Atlanta native Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached about climbing. The boxer who had won Olympic gold in 1960, then threw his medal in the Ohio River after being refused service in an all-white restaurant. The man who represented the racial and social polarization of the 1960s and early 1970s when he took a Muslim name and said he didn’t have anything against “them Viet Cong.”
Ali, the world’s best-known sports figure of the last 50 years. Ali, showing 3 billion telespectators worldwide that his nation, his native South, can rise above itself in the heat of a steamy Georgia summer night. Ali, 54, his face smooth and young and his arm wobbling from a disease of age, summing up the Olympic Century. It was the greatest.
– Philip Hersh, the Tribune’s Olympic writer, has covered every Olympics since 1980.
JOHN HUSAR
Unfortunately, these Atlanta Olympics forever will be clouded for me by 16-hour workdays made brutally inefficient by constant transport snafus abetted by mindless security restrictions.
As woeful as the security has been in Atlanta, you’d never know by the legions of ill-informed, autocratic “badges” whose jobs have amounted to nothing more than enforcing ignorant and useless restrictions while pushing innocent people around.
The contests themselves were carried off beautifully–but only because they were not touched by the bureaucratic monstrosity of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG, otherwise known as “A-FOG”). I will cherish the spectacles of Turkish weightlifter Naim Suleymangolu and Russian super-heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler Aleksandr Karelin each winning third gold medals and of watching Spain’s great Miguel Indurain cycle the Atlanta streets.
But my truest Olympic moment came on the last evening of wrestling competition, just two days from the Closing Ceremony. Americans Tom Brands and Bruce Baumgartner had won their medals and now we were writing their stories in the darkened grandstand of the wrestling hall while workers dismantled the venue.
I looked up to see some 50 or 60 people, mostly officials and their families, milling about the Olympic mats–something they could do now that the matches were done and security had departed. Kids romped on the mats, some doing gymnastics floor exercises, others playfully wrestling on the very spots where greatness had been achieved. A few Olympic coaches were down there with them, teaching moves, refereeing the impromptu bouts.
This is how the Olympics used to be for me, an Olympics that was changed negatively by Munich and reinforced by Atlanta. We don’t have many sweet moments like these anymore.
– John Husar, Tribune outdoors columnist, covered cycling and many other sports.
BERNIE LINCICOME
My lasting impression of the Olympics will not be the tackiness, the relentless commercial hype or the lordly presumptions of the Olympic committees. I will remember how enjoyable the people were.
They were full of energy and fun and there did not seem to be a sad sack among their endless number.
They were willing to smile and say excuse me. They were unfailingly considerate of others in the crowd behind them, telling them to take care, that there was a step down, and this was most helpful since the crowd was so dense it was not only impossible to see your feet, but to know if there was actually ground underneath them.
They were the spirit of the Olympics, making their own fun, dancing to street music, forming conga lines, singing at the venues. They refused to be cowed or bored. Even the wave was contagious.
What I will remember is how reassuring it was to find how well the human race is getting on.
– Bernie Lincicome, Tribune columnist.
SKIP MYSLENSKI
There was Michael Johnson, the latest MJ, incomparable enough to leave all who viewed him in the throes of disbelief. There was Carl Lewis, King Carl, reaching back and somehow finding a performance from his youth.
There was Jackie Joyner-Kersee, as regal as the late Jackie O, quitting the heptathlon with damaged hamstrings, winning a bronze in the long jump on those same hamstrings. And there was Caren Kemner, once the world’s finest female volleyball player, explaining with eyes ablaze how she was handling her latest role, that of experienced vet coming off the bench.
They and countless others are part of the Olympic memory bank, but remembered most is the private chat with 33-year-old Yaro Dachniwsky, itinerant soccer goalie until last November, third-string team handball goalie here. At these Garish Games that were so often a cesspool of commercialism, he was a throwback, a reminder that old-fashioned ideas and ideals still live in this modern age.
Growing up in Chicago and playing in that city’s alleys, he never associated sports and money. He just dreamed of being the next Tony Esposito. He still doesn’t associate sports and money, and he surely wouldn’t be making any from his appearance here. He just believed the best way to close out his career was as an Olympian.
Who could ask for more?
– Skip Myslenski covered track and field and many other sports.
SAM SMITH
So I set out to find the Olympic spirit.
I went to gymnastics and saw Kerri Strug, who should have had a cellular phone on her when she did that vault with a sprained ankle the way she was looking for agents so fast.
And this kid is what, 18? Don’t ever condemn a high school kid for leaving for the NBA again.
Then I saw Carl Lewis campaigning for a spot on the relay team to get his 10th gold medal. Couldn’t help but see Lewis since he was stopping by everyone’s hotel room to make his case that this Olympics was about his personal records.
Then I saw some of the U.S. women’s soccer players and U.S. boxers, who were whining that NBC didn’t televise their events enough, so now they wouldn’t be getting those big endorsement deals like Strug.
Then I saw Charles Barkley meeting with the daughter of the bombing victim at Centennial Park and giving her his jersey.
Then I saw Gary Payton escorting a terminally ill girl from Seattle to meet all his Dream Team teammates and get her autographs and shoes.
I saw Scottie Pippen stay around long after the postgame interview session had ended to accommodate some international writers who couldn’t get credentials to get into the main interview area.
That’s right, the best examples of the Olympic spirit I saw anywhere here were from those supposedly spoiled NBA stars whom nobody seems to even want here.
They’ve been cooperative, accommodating and professional.
Yet no American athletes here have taken as much criticism. And all they did was accept invitations to play here. And then went out and played well.
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Too bad America has become so spoiled and jaded it cannot appreciate great athletes performing magnificently.
I was glad I got a chance to see it.
– Sam Smith, Tribune pro basketball writer, covered men’s and women’s basketball.
BOB VERDI
It was the night after the bomb went off in Centennial Park, and the buses must have been depressed too. The ride I needed back to the hotel wasn’t there, so the dispatcher at the transportation center called a backup driver in a van.
Some backup. She was 68, a black woman who had lived in Atlanta all her life. She had nine grandchildren, a couple of whom were in Centennial Park the night before. She had a personality that would light up a room.
“Don’t be down on us and don’t be down on Atlanta after last night,” she said. “There are good people in life, and there are bad people. It’s always been that way, and always will be.
“I was here when I couldn’t show my face in public, because of my color. Now I’m a volunteer meeting people from all over the world. Who would have thought it possible? The bomb was awful, but there’s a reason for everything. Now get a good night’s sleep, and God bless you.”
She never saw an Olympic event, and she certainly never won a medal. But she represented the spirit of these Summer Games better than any athlete. I wish I had asked for her name.
– Bob Verdi, Tribune columnist.
GENE WOJCIECHOWSKI
At first, I couldn’t think of a moment worth remembering, not even slivers of one. It was an Olympics that didn’t feel like an Olympics. Instead, it was the 1996 NBC/Nike/Just-for-the-taste-of-it/Have-yourself-a-break-today Summer Games.
But leave it to Muhammad Ali to burn through the corporate fog. For a man who can barely whisper, Ali somehow said more in two cameo appearances than Billy Payne could say with a teleprompter and an hour’s worth of air time.
My dad served a tour of duty in Vietnam. He was a career Air Force man who seethed at the thought of Ali’s refusal to fight an inconvenient war. There were no gray areas with our family’s Great Santini: Either you did what your country asked, or you didn’t.
If he were still alive, I wonder how Lt. Col. Chet Wojciechowski would have reacted the night of the Opening Ceremony, when Ali, hands and arms quivering from Parkinson’s syndrome, appeared from the darkness and lit the Olympic flame. I’m guessing he would have done what his son did, which was brush the tears away with a knuckle.
Like Ali himself said, “Things change.”
– Gene Wojciechowski, Tribune college basketball writer, covered gymnastics and many other sports.