The Olympics... and beyond

 During the busy high school season, Sundays are the day when I do my most writing. I try to keep up with things during the week, but usually by Sunday I have a number of stories to write and my deadlines start on Monday, so the stories have to be finished. Today, I had two basketball stories, two hockey stories and about half a dozen alpine skiing stories. Plus, I had to edit a few stories from other writers, but all told, I spent about eight hours working on stories on my couch. While I was working, I had the television on watching a bunch of broadcasts that I had recorded during the week, including snowboarding, biathlon, luge and alpine skiing World Cup races from all around Europe. As I've mentioned before, I spend a lot of time watching these competitions over the last few months and I really enjoy them. Unfortunately, NBC Sports Network is going off the air by the end of the year, which means the broadcasts of the winter sports will probably fall to the wayside. That is pret...

Tokyo has been in the news a bit this week, and honestly, it wasn't terribly encouraging. But then again, that's pretty much been the case ever since last March. It was reported by one news outlet that officials in Tokyo were likely going to cancel the Olympics, which have, for the first time ever, been postponed from last year's scheduled dates to this coming summer. It didn't take long for officials from both the Tokyo Organizing Committee and the International Olympic Committee to deny those rumors and state they are planning on moving ahead with the competition coming in July. Obviously, for me, this has been a pretty frustrating year for many reasons. Of course, the layoff back in April was a big part of it, but also a big part of that was the cancellation of five different trips I had planned, including two huge ones, Ireland and Tokyo. I was really looking forward to spending a few weeks this past summer covering my first Summer Olympics. But, that didn't hap...

Yesterday, Monday, Jan. 4, marked 200 days until the start of the Tokyo Olympics. Obviously, we had this same countdown a year ago, so hopefully the second time goes better than the first time. Of course, there is a lot of things that have to fall into place for the Tokyo Olympics to take place as planned. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused much havoc around the world and has forced the organizers of the Tokyo Games as well as the International Olympic Committee, to spend millions upon millions of dollars to make the changes necessary to move the Olympics back a year, an unprecedented move, something that has never been done before. I believe that keeping athletes, coaches, officials, volunteers and all other stakeholders (including media) safe is a top priority for all the organizers. Obviously, with all the money that has gone into these Olympics, they need to happen, one way or the other. If things haven't cleared up a bit more by the time that June rolls around, I think there may...