HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I will admit it. When my sister and I were kids, say, 8 and 5?
We would do Olympic events in the living room. The couch was both pommel horse and
balance beam. Much to the chagrin of my mom. It never worked very successfully. (In the
winter, we would ice skate in socks on the slick wood of the hallway. That was
incredibly successful, and gave me much confidence. Unfulfilled on real ice.)
We just saw a very wonderful documentary about
the Boys on the Boat, the 1936 Olympics. So great.
Do you watch the Olympics? (I do.) (Pretty much.) (My station is an NBC affiliate.)
Why?
Go for the Gold
By Claire Booth
The Olympics start tomorrow. I can’t wait! I am
a hopeless Olympic romantic. I’m in love with them. I love sports as it is, but
the Olympics take my enjoyment to a whole new level. The competitions, the
flags, the tears. The sappy athlete profiles from NBC.
Yes, I’m not ashamed (too much) to admit that I
love the vignettes that the Peacock Network subjects us to during their
Olympics coverage.
Sure they’re slick and overproduced, and
sometimes overwrought, but they’re stories.
Little books in miniature, where the only thing missing is the ending – how
will the determined athlete do? And so of course, you watch the event and you
cheer even more than you would have, because now you’re invested.
You’re kidding, she
never even got in a pool until she was fifteen?! Oh my gosh, he’s come back
from two broken feet to run in this race!
Say what you want about NBC, they make you care
whether you intend to or not. Which is not unlike, say, a novelist.
Writers have to get you to care about the
characters. They have to manipulate your emotions. If they’re really good, they
make you laugh, or cry, or gasp in surprise. And they convince you to stick
around for the finish.
(Billy Miles wins the 10,000
meter race at the 1964 Olympics. Credit: U.S. Marine Corps)
Sometimes, though, no matter what novelists come
up with, reality beats us at our own game.
At the 1936 Olympics, an African American
athlete named Jesse Owens won four track and field gold medals. In Berlin. In
front of Adolf Hitler.
In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In
response, President Carter decreed that the United States would boycott the
1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. American athletes became pawns in the Cold War.
There are many more instances, of course, where
real world politics mixed with the sports of the Olympics. As a former
journalist, I have to admit that I follow these stories particularly closely. This
year, I’m really looking forward watching the refugee team, made up of athletes
from South Sudan and other war-torn nations that don’t have Olympic squads,
compete.
There is always so much to learn about
storytelling from real life, and there’s no better microcosm of the world today
than the Olympics and its athletes.
Reds, do you watch the Olympics? Which events
are your favorites? And do you sit through the athlete profiles or prefer to go
straight to the action?
HANK: Summer
Olympics? Gymnastics. (Nadia!) Track and field. Not so much beach volleyball.
Winter? Figure skating. I am SO
predictable. (Torvill and Dean!)
And I have a t-shirt, because I work for NBC, that’s
the official NBC 1980 Olympic t-shirt. Except it turned out to be an event that
they did not cover.
How about you? Olympics? I give them a…9.5. (Except for that doping and cheating thing.)
And have you read Claire's THE BRANSON BEAUTY? It's a marvelous locked room--er, boat--mystery. I loved it! So much--that I'll give a copy to one lucky commenter!
Claire Booth spent
more than a decade as a daily newspaper reporter, much of it covering crimes so
convoluted and strange they seemed more like fiction than reality. Eventually,
she had enough of the real world and decided to write novels instead. Her
Sheriff Hank Worth mystery series takes place in Branson, Missouri, where
small-town Ozark politics and big-city country music tourism clash in, yes,
strange and convoluted ways. Find her at www.clairebooth.com.
THE BRANSON BEAUTY
The Branson Beauty, an old showboat, has inexplicably
crashed on the waters of the Ozark mountain lake it’s been plying for decades.
Hank Worth is still settling into his new job as county sheriff, and when he
responds to the emergency call, he knows he’s in for a long winter’s day of
ferrying more than one hundred passengers to shore. But he doesn’t expect to
find the body of a high school track star locked inside the Captain’s private
dining room. Now he must navigate small town politics as he tries to figure out
who killed the talented local girl.
