The Olympics... and beyond

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 ...

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 ...

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 t...

  Two years ago right around this time I was embarking on my first Summer Olympic experience. The Tokyo Games, postponed from 2020 to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were a unique experience. We, as media members, were subject to regular COVID testing, there were no fans in the stands and masks were required everywhere we went. After two previous Winter Olympics, the heat of the summer was a new experience for me as well. The next winter, the Beijing Winter Olympics experience was much the same, with even more COVID testing, limited fans in the stands and masks required everywhere.  For those reasons, those Olympic experiences were definitely some of the most memorable things I have done in this job. As this goes to press, we are one year out from the Paris Olympics, opening on July 26, 2024 in the French capital. In preparation for that, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach spoke to the media in a Zoom call last Tuesday afternoon. “My expectations for the ...

  By nature of the job, I spend a lot of time in my car, driving to and from the office or around the state to cover games, meets and events of all kinds. It’s safe to say, I drive a lot. And I always kind of thought I was a pretty good driver. But, after a couple of experiences behind the wheel of a NASCAR stock car, I can say without a doubt that I was in no way meant to be a professional driver. Last year I attended my first Media Racing Challenge, sponsored by the New Hampshire Motor Speedway. It is an annual event where members of the media get the chance to get behind the wheel of a stock car and take some laps on the Magic Mile.  As I wrote at the time , I had been around the track on a couple of different occasions in the pace car, once in an SUV and the other time in a sedan, where I found myself sitting on the passenger seat riding incredibly close to the wall as the professional driver maneuvered the car around the track. I was excited to get the chance last year an...

I must admit, the Olympics have taken a bit of a back seat the last few months, as the busy spring season took over my work life, keeping me on the road every day covering games all over the state.  With Saturday's baseball and softball championship games, the spring season officially came to an end and with it, my busy season drew to a close. I use the summer months to take a bit of a writing break, though I still cover things and write stories to keep the papers full of content. However, my output in the summer months pales in comparison to the school year. I feel like I earn a bit of a break. Obviously next summer will be pretty busy, with the Paris Summer Olympics scheduled for the end of July and beginning of August, meaning I'll be spending June and early July gearing up for that trip. Over the course of the last few months, I was able to make my accommodation requests to the Paris 2024 team. As has been my case in the previous Olympics, I went with the least expensive op...

Over the last 20 years doing this job, I have been lucky enough to cover some events in some pretty cool places. The first place on that list was probably New Hampshire Motor Speedway, where I have had the chance to cover multiple NASCAR weekends and even got in a car and did some laps.  As time has continued, I have made a few different trips to Florida to cover the Kingswood baseball team in its spring training trips to both Bradenton and Vero Beach, and this year added the Kennett baseball team to the Florida coverage. I traveled to Nashville, Tenn. a few years back to cover a couple of local anglers competing in the high school national championships on Kentucky Lake. I've also followed local Cal Ripken teams to regional tournaments around New England and covered high school championship contests in numerous cool collegiate locations. Another highlight was watching the Brewster Academy basketball team play on the historic parquet floor at the TD Garden Of course, this blog is m...

The countdown can officially begin. After spending Wednesday in Raleigh for a live Rob Has a Podcast event, I headed back to the Raleigh airport to catch a plane south to Orlando, where Kennett and Kingswood teams were heading for a little spring training baseball action. As I ate some breakfast, I turned on my computer to check my e-mail and one popped up that caught my attention. From "Accreditation," it was indeed the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee e-mailing a confirmation that I had received a credential for the upcoming Paris Olympics next summer. The USOPC e-mail said that they had granted accreditation to 135 different media outlets for Paris, compared to 77 outlets in Tokyo, 111 in Rio in 2016 and 119 in London in 2012. So, I guess I have to count myself lucky that I was able to nab a credential given the incredible interest in the 2024 Summer Olympics. I would like to think that my willingness to cover the last two Olympics during the middle of a pand...

Yesterday, March 14, marked 500 days to go until the Paris Olympics next summer. And as of this writing, there has still been no word from the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee as to whether or not I have been granted credentials for the Paris Games. Back in mid-February I had reached out to the USOPC about when a decision might be made and was told at that time, that the decision would be made by the end of February. Obviously, the end of February has come and gone and there has still been no word, at least on my end. For the most part, I am taking the lack of communication as an indication that I don't have credentials for Paris, which would not be a huge surprise to me, but would also be kind of disappointing given the fact that I covered two Olympics in the COVID pandemic while many larger outlets declined to send journalists to Tokyo and/or Beijing. I am well aware that weekly newspapers are pretty much at the bottom of the priority list for credentials, which was why it was...

If you follow me on social media, specifically Twitter, I was pretty worked up on Monday night as I tried to get into the Division IV boys' basketball semifinals at Merrimack Valley High School. I arrived approximately midway through the first of two semifinal games, hoping to see the end of the first game before the Littleton-Woodsville game as the nightcap. However, when I got there, there was a large crowd outside the locked doors and nobody was being allowed in, since the gym was at capacity. It was a bit frustrating on my part. I understood the reasons, but there was a person standing next to me in the lobby at MVHS with a ticket for the first game who couldn't get in either. And my biggest issue was that there was nobody coming out to tell people what was going on inside. The first game went to double-overtime, meaning the folks with tickets to the second game were left standing around (many outside) for longer than expected, with no access to bathrooms after a two-hour d...

I have to admit, I was getting a bit nervous. I've had the honor of covering four of the last five Olympic Games, including winter stops in Sochi, Russia, PyeongChang, South Korea and Beijing, China and a summer stop in Tokyo, Japan. Ahead of each of those Olympics, I have traditionally heard early on whether I've been granted credentials. I remember prior to my first Olympics, I actually got the confirmation e-mail during high school football season (I was in the parking lot of the Burger King in North Conway after a Kennett football game, checking my e-mail since coverage is not great at the high school). That would have been in the fall of 2012, a year and a half ahead of the Olympics, which took place in February of 2014 (I was there, nine years ago at this time). The PyeongChang and Beijing timelines were pretty close to the same.  The only Summer Olympics I have been to was in Tokyo, originally scheduled for 2020. I received my confirmation of credentials for those Games ...

One thing that I will always remember about Tom Underwood is his handshake.  Sure, he won more than 500 games as a baseball coach at Plymouth Regional High School, coached thousands of kids from their debuts in organized baseball up through their high school careers, built successful feeder programs for the dominating Plymouth football and wrestling programs, was one of the first people enshrined into the New Hampshire Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame, was a heck of a math teacher, raised three kids with his wonderful wife and had a hand in seemingly just about anything that went on in the Plymouth community over the last few decades. But man, I can never forget that handshake. It felt like your hand was going to be crushed. Coach Underwood passed away last week at the age of 72. Even though he had stepped down as the varsity baseball coach at Plymouth, he was still very active in the school and the community, keeping the books at basketball games, coaching junior high sof...

As last year came to an end and 2023 kicked off, I made a move from the place that I have called home for the past 20+ years to a new apartment in Wolfeboro. There was really no reason for it other than it was time for a change. I attempted to bring my DirecTV package with me to the new location, but after a discussion on the phone with a DirecTV representative, it became obvious that I couldn't do that, since the new apartment would not get satellite service because of the many, many trees that surround the house where I am living. As a devoted television addict, I had to look for another option to get my fix. My only experience with streaming services before the move was my subscription to Paramount-Plus, which I did during Survivor season 40 in order to get the awesome behind the scenes videos that came out during that season, which aired during the height of COVID in the spring of 2020. Beyond watching those videos, I didn't really watch much else online, but I knew that I ...