Saturday, February 24, 2024

What lies ahead

The coming months are starting to look pretty busy and that's not even considering the busy spring schedule for the local high school teams, which will start in early April. There are a bunch of trips on the docket in the next few months leading up to the big one this coming summer.

The first trip on the schedule is one that has become a pretty regular tradition. At the end of March I will be flying to Orlando and traveling on to Vero Beach to cover one of our local teams getting in some spring training action. Most of the trips I've made to Florida with local teams have been with Kingswood baseball and last year, Kennett baseball was also there at the same time, which was perfectly convenient for me. This year, Kingswood softball is making its maiden voyage to the Jackie Robinson Training Complex for a few days. I am flying down the night before the team and leaving the day after they do. I am currently looking into something to do for the day on Friday before the team arrives and I am sure I will find something exciting.

The next trip is just a few weeks later and is a bit shorter of a journey. I registered for media credentials for the Team USA Media Summit ahead of the Paris Olympics and received notice yesterday that my credential request had been approved. This is the first in-person media summit Team USA has done since prior to the PyeongChang Olympics and this will be the first one that I have attended. It is timed to coincide with the 100 days to go countdown for the Paris Olympics. I booked a room at the hotel where the event is based, right in the middle of New York, which was probably the most expensive hotel room I have ever booked, even with our discount. I am taking the train from Boston to New York on that Sunday and returning on the Wednesday evening train. This is one I am definitely looking forward to.

In May, I will be making a return trip to Chicago for a Rob Has a Podcast Survivor event. For those that don't know, I am an avid listener to Rob Has a Podcast, hosted by former Survivor contestant Rob Cesternino. I make it a point to try and make his live shows (last season I went to one in New York and another in New Orleans). This season the location is Chicago and while there, I am going to cross another baseball stadium off the bucket list and see a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. This will be a couple of days in early May.

Speaking of checking stadiums off the list, I will be driving to Toronto in early June to see the Red Sox play the Blue Jays at the stadium formerly known as SkyDome. I have been to the stadium before but have never seen a game, so it will be cool to check another MLB park off the list and see the Red Sox play as well.

Then of course, there's the big trip, the three-week journey to Paris at the end of July. There is still plenty of work to be done on that front, but there is evidently plenty to keep me busy between now and then.


Tokyo's Olympics were pretty quiet, given the COVID and all, but this summer promises to bring a little more excitement. And in the months leading up to that, there's still plenty to do too.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Milestones looking back and forward

The last couple of days have provided some milestones in the road ahead and in the road that I have traveled over the years.

As I mentioned in the last blog post, at this time two years ago, I was in Beijing for the Winter Olympics, my third Winter Olympics experience and my fourth Olympics overall. Without a question, it was one of the most unique experiences of my life, covering another Olympics during the midst of the pandemic.

My Facebook memories informed me that two years ago on this day, I was at one of the most unusual venues I've ever covered an Olympics at, the Shougang Big Air facility in Beijing. This was the only outdoor venue in the city limits of Beijing, with the rest of the outdoor events in the mountain villages outside of the city. What made this venue unique was not just the fact that it was an outdoor venue in the city limits, but rather where it was built. It was built in an industrial area of the city that the government was working to revitalize. Driving to the venue we drove past numerous old factories and arriving at the venue we were greeted by four huge cooling towers, the kind of things usually seen at nuclear power plants. Without a question, this will be one of the most unique venues I ever see, though I'm excited to cover some beach volleyball at the Eiffel Tower and equestrian at Versailles this summer.

My Facebook memories also reminded me that 10 years ago today I made my original foray into the Olympics, landing in Sochi, Russia. Without a question, that was one of the more nerve-wracking adventures of my life. I was so concerned about the ability to find my way through the airport in Moscow to get on my flight to Sochi and what I would do once I landed in the Olympic city. All my concerns were calmed and it turned out to be a great experience in a place that I would never have traveled to without the Olympics making an appearance there. Sochi was a unique location in that the indoor venues were located next to the Black Sea in a pretty temperate environment, complete with palm trees, which took me by surprise to say the least.  The Media Center in Sochi remains one of the coolest places I've had the chance to work in. And I will forever remain grateful to all the people who helped me fundraise for that trip, making it possible for me to start on this incredible journey that has lasted close to a dozen years.

Looking back, yesterday marked two years to go until the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, which I have to admit, is one of the locations I am really excited to see. As I've mentioned before, one of the best things about the first four Olympic experiences was that they were all in places I had never been before. I have been to Paris and to Italy (including Milan), but I have never really had the chance to cover the Winter Olympics in a true winter environment and the Alps will definitely be that.

I also officially booked my flight to Paris for this summer. The plan is to fly out of Boston early on Tuesday, July 23, with a stop in New York City before traversing the Atlantic Ocean and arriving in Paris just before 10 p.m. local time. The return flight will be on Monday, Aug. 12, leaving in the afternoon and with the time change, arriving back in Boston on a direct flight at 6 p.m. Flying to Paris in the summer is not a cheap venture, but it's something else checked off the list in preparation for this summer.


The Shougang Big Air facility in Beijing will forever be one of the most unique venues I have covered an event at.

Friday, February 2, 2024

Going back in time

Facebook memories have become an easy way to look back on what you were doing a year ago, or three years ago, or 10-plus years ago. They might jog your memory and bring some things back to the forefront for a bit.

That happened today when I looked at some of my memories from two years ago. It was on this day, Feb. 2, back in 2022 that I landed in Beijing for my third Winter Olympics experience. That in and of itself is just another trip on the Olympic list, but that particular experience, that particular day, remains to this day one of the most surreal things I've ever been a part of and it made me want to retell the story.

With the COVID-19 pandemic still in full force, the Beijing Olympics used a number of different protocols to help keep everyone safe, including media members who were traveling to China to cover the Games. One of the protocols, which proved to be a giant pain in the butt due to airline travel problems, was having all games-related personnel arrive in Beijing on special flights, meaning we had to book certain flights from one of a select group of cities.

My flight came from Paris and for the most part was pretty normal, but when we landed, it was far from normal.

I remember walking down the jetway into the terminal to find a completely empty building. The terminal had been cleared of people and only Olympic-related persons were permitted in this one terminal. It was incredibly spooky, much like you were emerging from your bunker after the apocalypse (or I would suspect anyway). We moved through the terminal behind a couple of volunteers/employees who were dressed head to toe in hazmat suits. We got to one waiting area and we sat and waited as they processed our papers, one at a time. We moved on to another area, where again, hazmat suits greeted us as they went through more of our paperwork. And finally they led us all to a room where we had to sit and wait for our transportation to take us to the specific hotels where we were staying.

I know that the main reason for all of the precaution was to keep us, and thus, everyone else associated with the Olympics, safe, but looking back on that day, it's still weird to remember that empty airport terminal, the hazmat suits and the fact that I was on the other side of the world about to cover my second Olympics in a pandemic.

I'm glad I glanced at those Facebook memories this morning, it brought back an interesting time in my life and has me looking forward to July, when hopefully I will not be in an empty airport with people in hazmat suits leading us around.

Incidentally, in that short, weird voyage through the airport, I first left my passport at one counter and had to go back through a checkpoint to pick it up, then left my vaccine card at another checkpoint, which was eventually brought to the room where we were waiting for our buses. Maybe the surrealness of it all just got to me.


Flying in to Beijing two years ago for the Winter Olympics, not yet aware of the surreal scene that was about to unfold in the airport.

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

200 days to go

The official countdown clock to the Paris Summer Olympics reached 200 days yesterday, Jan. 8. This means that in less than that amount of time I will be heading off to Paris for my fifth Olympic experience and my first Olympic experience in a city I have visited before.

Prior to covering the Olympics, my travels had never taken me to Sochi, Russia, PyeongChang, South Korea, Tokyo, Japan or Beijing, China. While I now can say I have visited all of those places, long before I made my first Olympic trip, I spent a short amount of time in Paris.

The year was 2001, shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. As a UNH graduate, I had gone back and played with the marching band for a few years as a post-grad and also continued to play in the pep band. The band director at the time, Tom Keck, announced that the UNH Marching Band was traveling to Europe and invited anyone who was playing in the band, so long as they paid their own way, to come along, opening up an opportunity to make my first trip abroad (other than Canada).

We landed in Zurich, Switzerland, then flew over the Alps to Milan, Italy, where we spent some time before making our way along the Italian coast toward the French city of Nice, which will be hosting some of the soccer tournament games this summer and will also serve as a city base for the 2030 Winter Olympics. We visited Nice and Monaco, playing a New Year's parade (going into 2002) in Cannes and played at the prince's palace in Monaco as well. From there, we hopped the bullet train and made our way to Paris. 

While in the City of Light, I was part of a group that actually got to do quite a bit in a short period of time. One of the members of our friend group had been to Paris before and knew how to navigate the subway system pretty well, which allowed us to make great use of our day in the city. We went up the Arc de Triomphe, visited Notre Dame Cathedral and the catacombs, walked by the Louvre (the line was way too long) and went up the Eiffel Tower in the twilight. It was a whirlwind trip, but it is certainly a great city.

Of course, my most recent visits to Paris were on the way to and from the Beijing Olympics, where a COVID testing facility almost kept me from getting home. That's an experience I'd rather not relive this summer. You can read about that experience here.

This time around, my time in Paris will be slightly longer and will include a bit more sports than the 2001-2002 trip and I am excited to get a chance to see more of the city. After not really getting the opportunity to see much of Tokyo and Beijing except what we could see out a bus window, it will be nice to get out into the city a little more.

The next step is booking a flight and filling out my paperwork for the USOPC, which will handles all our appplications and credential paperwork.


In less than 200 days, the Paris Olympics officially kick off.

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Developments in the road ahead

It's actually been a pretty newsworthy few weeks for the Olympics, despite the fact that we aren't in an Olympic year and the Paris Games are still more than seven months away.

The IOC announced in the last few weeks that it had entered into targeted dialogue with a pair of locations to host the Winter Olympics in 2030 and 2034.

It had long been rumored and reported that Salt Lake City, which hosted the Winter Olympics back in 2002, was interested in hosting again. The idea of a bid is seemingly popular with people in Utah and the locations used for those games are still in great shape and could be used again. In fact, many of them are used by the United States teams to do training throughout the year.

The big question was whether or not Salt Lake City would be in the mix for 2030 or for 2034. The preference of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee was for the later date, as the 2030 Games would come less than two years after the US hosted the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles. While it was possible to make it happen, for the sake of sponsorships and other logistics, the 2034 date was preferable for most people involved on the US end.

And the IOC announced that indeed, Salt Lake City would be targeted for the 2034 Winter Olympics, with the 2030 Winter Olympics targeted dialogue going to the French Alps. This one surprised me a little bit, because of all the stuff I had read had pointed toward Sweden, Switzerland and Japan being possibilities for the Winter Olympics.

The French Alps bid is interesting to me in a few ways and I was interested to read the feasibility assessment provided by the IOC. First and foremost, it will be a little like Sochi in that there will be events taking place in the relatively warmer climate of Nice. I was in Nice in January of 2002 and it wasn't terribly cold (also wasn't as warm as Sochi), so it's interesting, but much like Sochi, the indoor venues for ice hockey, curling, figure skating and short track will all be located in the coastal area, along with the Main Press Center and the International Broadcast Center. There are plans to build the two hockey rinks in Nice, while the other venues are existing. A venue for speed skating is still to be determined.

There will be three other venue clusters, Meribel-Bozel, Montgenevre-Briancon-Serre Chevalier and Le Grand-Bornand. Montgenevre-Briancon-Serre Chevalier will be home to Big Air, Slopestyle, Aerials, Moguls and Halfpipe, with snowboard and ski cross in a location to be determined in the cluster. Meribel-Bozel will be the home to sliding sports, ski jumping and alpine skiing and Le Grand-Bornand will be hosting biathlon and cross country skiing.

In Salt Lake, like in 2002, the IBC and MPC will be located downtown, along with venues for hockey, figure skating, short track and speed skating. Curling will return to a venue in Ogden, while Snowbasin Resort will host alpine skiing. Utah Olympic Park has the venue for sliding sports, snowboard and ski cross and ski jumping, Park City will host halfpipe and Slopestyle, Deer Valley Resort will host aerials and moguls and Soldier Hollow will host cross country and biathlon. There's also plans to again use a hockey rink in Provo as well. Salt Lake's feasibility study was also an interesting read.

While I can't expect that I will still be covering the Olympics in 2030 and 2034, it is pretty neat to see the next steps being taken toward Olympic sites. And Switzerland's bid was a non-edition-specific project, which the IOC liked and has decided to grant it a special status, 'privileged dialogue,' with an eye toward the 2038 Games.

Lots of development as we move closer to next summer's Games in Paris.


The US Ski and Snowboard Team posted this on its website when it was announced that Salt Lake City was entering targeted dialogue for hosting the 2034 Winter Olympics. (USSA)

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Money in the bank

As anyone who has read this blog for any period of time knows, the Olympic adventures I go on every few years come with a price tag. In the year leading up to my first Olympic experience in Sochi back in 2014, I had fundraisers and got great support from the community as I looked to have what I viewed as a once in a lifetime experience.

My company matched all the money I raised and because of that, the trip four years later to PyeongChang was essentially all paid for. Since then, I've been to Tokyo and Beijing and I have basically funded those trips on my own dime. The company pays me for the work I do while I am there, but because they are not forcing me to cover the Olympics (or even asking me to), it's not their responsibility to pay for my trip. And since these are no longer once in a lifetime opportunities, I also don't believe I can be going around asking people for money. The expenses associated with the Olympic trips prior to departure are mainly the accommodations and the flight, while food is the main expense once I am on the ground in an Olympic city. Our transportation, admission to events, wireless Internet and media center access is all free of charge.

So, what I've done, ever since I came back to the papers after the pandemic layoff, is work as much as I can at my second job at the Yum Yum Shop in Wolfeboro. During the summer I work at least 40 hours a week and during the school year, I work at least 30 hours a week. I pick up extra shifts when I can and much of the money I make at that job goes into my Olympic account to pay for these trips. And I make wire transfers from that account to the various Olympic committees around the world.

The wire transfer process for the Beijing Olympics in February of 2022 was by far the hardest and most complicated process I had been through regarding sending money for these trips. First, the bank where I have my account, didn't deal in the Chinese currency and Beijing wouldn't accept US dollars. So, I had to create another account at another bank and go from there. It took me and the very understanding and patient woman at Citizen's Bank in Wolfeboro three different tries to get the money through to Beijing. The first time we were missing a code (that was never provided to us), the second time the code was the wrong one and the third time it finally went through. It was a long and annoying process, much like the leadup to Beijing with flights and COVID tests was a few months after making those payments.

Within the last two weeks, I received my invoice for the first half of my accommodation payment for Paris next summer. The Paris Organizing Committee breaks our accommodation payments up into two invoices, with the chance to get some of our money back if we have to cancel at certain points. My bill this time was for close to 1,000 euros and the second one will be bigger (they add the city tax to the second invoice).

I visited Tammy at TD Bank in Wolfeboro and we set to work on getting a wire transfer going to Paris. The first roadblock that we ran into was there was no bank address on the invoice and the wire transfer needed one. I did a google search on the bank name and got an address that Tammy put on the invoice with the hope that it was correct. We got all the paperwork done and I left hoping that we had hit every nail on the head.

Early the next week, I checked in on the accommodation management web site and it read my invoice as "paid," so everything we had done had gone through and now, Paris 2024 officially has some of my money (I guess it's their money now).

If the worse case scenario comes along and the trip has to be cancelled for whatever reason, there are opportunities to get some of my money back, but I am now officially invested in this trip. The next step will be booking a flight and then I will have to make the second accommodation payment in the first few months of next year.

As of right now, there are 281 days until the Opening Ceremonies in Paris next summer. That means there's about 276-77 days until I likely will leave for Paris. In the meantime, there's plenty of baking to be done at the Yum Yum Shop because Milan-Cortina is only two and a half years away.


French residents celebrated one year to go earlier this summer in Paris. They also may have recently celebrated me sending them a bunch of money. Photo from Paris 2024.

Tuesday, September 5, 2023

On the road to Paris

Over the course of the last month, there has been one main development in the road to Paris for the 2024 Olympics and that was in the area of accommodations.

I received an e-mail from the accommodation team in Paris stating that they had assigned me a room at F1 Paris Saint-Ouen Marche aux Puces, which is located in the Seine-St. Denis area of Paris, where the only new venue for these games, the new Aquatics Center, is being built. It is within five kilometers of the stadium for the opening and closing ceremonies and less than 10 kilometers from the Eiffel Tower and Roland Garros Stadium. The Main Press Center is about 11.5 kilometers away.

This will be the third Olympics in a row that I have stayed in an existing hotel after staying in dedicated media villages in both Sochi and PyeongChang. The initiative to cut back on costs of hosting the Olympics has likely been a factor in not really having traditional media villages, but rather putting media members up in hotels. Also, the fact that Tokyo, Beijing and Paris are major cities with thousands upon thousands of hotel rooms also is probably a factor. In both Tokyo and Beijing, I chose the hotels basically based on price and that was pretty much my deciding factor in this choice as well. I don't anticipate spending much time in my room other than sleeping, so it doesn't have to be anything special. 

My hotel in Tokyo had a pretty small room and limited food options, which became a problem when I had to spend my first three days in the hotel for my COVID quarantine. The Beijing hotel had a bigger room and much more in the food options, particularly in the breakfast that comes as part of our media package. It appears this Paris hotel will have more on the limited side of the food options. One of the best parts of Beijing was being able to eat a pretty large breakfast, which usually carried me through lunch so that I didn't have to spend money on two full meals a day, rather just one. That being said, I doubt Paris will have any shortage of places to eat.

This morning when I got to work, I signed what is called the Accommodation Management Agreement, which basically locks me into the rooms that they have assigned me. The bill is more than $2,000, a bit more than I paid in Beijing and Tokyo for similar hotel accommodations, but that is not terribly surprising for 20 nights. I did book especially early before the Olympics to maybe get there a bit ahead of time. I feel like it would be a nice change of pace to settle in to the whole situation instead of jumping right in. But, who knows.

Next up will be paying the first half of the invoice for the hotel, which will be due this month. The time spent making donuts full-time over the summer and close to full-time throughout the winter allowed me to put some money into my Olympic account to make sure I can cover this bill. The other big expense will be the flight, which I still have to work out. The Arrival and Departure System, or ADS, is expected to be live by the end of the year, at which time I can input my flight information and set up a way to get from the airport to my hotel.

It's less than a year until the Olympics and things are starting to get more and more official. 


At the one year to go celebration, dignitaries and others road on boats to replicate the opening ceremony planned for Paris next summer. Photo courtesy of Paris 2024.