DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU but I’ve been home 2 weeks and I’m still glowing like that flame-free Paris torch balloon over the Olympics just concluded. Très grand! A moveable feast — sure, I’ll steal another geographically appropriate metaphor — around the oval of the Stade de France and on the road courses in and about a world-class host city.
The real-time text and social media reactions of friends and family back home suggest you probably got your “WOW!” on too. Of this Games experience, in particular, my Swedish maternal grandpa, an Olympic attendee 88 years ago, might be a trifle envious were he still around. More about Morfar Bertil Steen later.
World Records, Olympic Records, delightful surprises, dramas of disappointment — this Games had it all. The athletes put on a SHOW!
Perhaps some month I’ll find time and inspiration to dissect the details and muse about repechage rounds or tear out more hair over the USA men’s short relay curse. Ouch! Has to hurt for the athletes involved.
Yet for now as the thrills are still reverberating — even as the Diamond League is back to serving up delights of its own — allow me to remind our mostly-USA readership: The next Summer Games, 4 short years hence, will be LA 2028.
Show up in person if you can. You know your friends will. The quadrennial extravaganza — with track & field! — makes lasting memories. The slick, sometimes over-syruped packaging you get on TV is not wrong about that.
Enough about not me 😂. For me Olympic attendance, immersion in the grand-mère of sporting carnivals, is personal. Aren’t all life’s keenest pleasures?
Are you wondering about the photo up top? The trio of 3-piece suit guys toting overcoats: my Swedish grandpa Bertil on the right; his brother Anders, on the left, briefcase suggests he was the bagman. The fella in between them, I’ve been told, was my Morfar’s boss at the time.
Where were they? The 1936 Olympics, Jesse Owens’ Games, Hitler’s Games — a historical moment as loaded with contradictions, tension and controversy as ours today. Yet we rightly celebrate Owens and his performances in the Olympic setting to this day. I’d wager the forebears, too, found plenty to enthuse about.
The inset to the right in the photo? We’re not the sharp-dressed men our grandfathers were, but that’s me, my cousin Anders (center and named after his farfar) and our wives, Lena and Anette. Family history, of a kind, repeating itself. I love “connections” like this one, and more so through the magic of an Olympics.
It pleases me equally that in Paris Lena and I found time for an over-dinner reunion with college track teammates, three in all, spouses accompanying a couple of us. I’ve had the privilege to steal a few non-working Olympic moments to drink it all in with one of these for-life friends at the Games of Atlanta, Athens, Beijing, London, Rio and now Paris. Track builds bonds; you probably know this.
Morfar Bertil passed away some 40 years post-Berlin. I wonder what were the highlights for him and “Anders the Elder”? Sweden won four golds in wrestling, one each in canoe and shooting. In the Olympic sport came two bronzes — one behind Finnish cross-Baltic rivals in the 5000, another in the hammer. Did they witness Owens? Maybe. Swede Lennart Strandberg pulled a muscle and placed 6th in the Owens-triumphant 100. Åke Stengvist tied for 10th in the long jump famous for Owens’ competition with German Luz Long.
Grandpa Bertil surely would have flown over the moon at news his grandson and grand nephew were on hand with 77,000 others for Mondo Duplantis’s ninth World Record and second Olympic gold. I think he’d have accepted stoically, as Anders did, that a Daniel Ståhl repeat discus gold was not to be. To witness the epic fight for it was the main thing.
At an Olympics, in the friends & family group I am the bagman, as it were — part of the media horde toting a backpack of work tools (laptop and binoculars for me) to the stadium. Wouldn’t trade them in.
Yet I’ll envy you a little too 4 years from now if you make that LA Olympics trip for nothing but fun, friendship and the thrills & chills. You won’t regret it.
