The Olympics holds a special place in my heart and it did so before I started working in the BBC Sport Olympics team last year. Tonight I went to the leaving drinks of a friend and colleague from the team and it’s dawned on me just how close we are to the games actually starting.
When I was 16 I spent a summer outside of Atlanta in a place called Augusta. It was 1996 and the Summer Olympics was on that year and Atlanta was the host city. A few weeks before the games started we went into town and I remember being filled with that sense of excitement that in just a few weeks athletes and people from all over the world would be arriving and all eyes would be on a city that I was walking around in, right then and there. Being from a small city with less than 100,000 inhabitants this was pretty amazing.
The night of the opening ceremony I was sat with the family I lived with watching it on TV. I had tears in my eyes. The sense of proudness that you could see in the athletes when they walked in with the flags of their countries and the excitement that the family I stayed with expressed about it all actually happening so close by, it really moved me.
A couple of weeks later I went back into Atlanta with a Swedish friend of mine and her family to watch the semi final in football. We spent the day walking around down town, going to the venues and generally taking in the atmosphere. The city was completely transformed from the last visit, decorated and filled with happy, cheering people. I was 16. It was my first trip abroad on my own and I just couldn’t believe my luck. I was in the US for the first time, in the middle of the Olympics and I felt like the world was lying at my feet. Everything was possible.
Today, as we stood there in the pub, it’s 17 days until the Summer Olympics officially opens in London, the city I now live in. And thanks to Donna Burgess who sent me a tweet from Andrew Travers who’d retweeted a tweet from Ben Gilmore who mentioned they were looking for people and who then put me in contact with Nick Haley who hired me, thanks to them I spent just over 10 months between April 2011 and March 2012 working on BBC Sport Olympics. A historic project for me, the different teams that have been involved, the BBC and for all of you who will be watching and reading about it. I’m incredibly happy and proud to having been part of it and I’ve made some amazing new friends. You will always have a special place in my heart. It’s made the Olympics and the 2012 London Olympics even more special for me. So thank you, all of you.
Nick’s written a piece about some of the different streams our team and others have been working on and some of the thinking and process around it if you want a bit of a flavour of what we’ve been up to.
Tomorrow – Day 193 | Sod the Jante law
Image source: Decorated pillar from our Sport Olympics corner back in January
