The Olympics... and beyond

Eight short months ago, I was on a mountain top two hours outside of downtown Beijing, China, watching as the woman regarded as one of the world's best alpine skiers, had what can only be described as the worst few days of her competition career. It was tough watching Mikaela Shiffrin go through what she went through following disappointing non-finishes in the Beijing Winter Olympics and it led to my most read blog post by far  and stoked many discussions both in Beijing and back at home in the United States. What made me think of this was the week that Mikaela just had, which can only be described as possibly one of the best weeks of her competition career, with three wins in a row, which pushes her closer to Lindsey Vonn's record for World Cup wins for a woman and closer to Ingemar Stenmark's record for World Cup wins for anyone and made her only the third person in history to record 80 World Cup wins. It was truly remarkable to follow the races while I was covering the n...

Those Facebook memories struck again. This time, it was Sunday when I happened to be on the laptop and took a quick break from work and the memory popped up. It was four years ago that day (December 18) that I received the e-mail from the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee that I had been granted credentials for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. What a ride that turned out to be. That e-mail came a scant 10 months after I had returned from PyeongChang, South Korea and the 2018 Winter Olympics. On a whim, wanting to see how a Summer Olympics experience would differ from the two Winter Olympics that I had been to, I had applied for credentials for the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. I was excited to get the chance to see something different, to see the Olympics without having to don a winter coat at any point. The next year proved to be much the same type of processes that I had gone leading up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Games and the aforementioned PyeongChang Games four years later...