The Olympics... and beyond

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...

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...