THE OLYMPICS ARE OVER - NOW WHAT?

Another four years have quickly come and gone, and another Summer Olympics is over.

It really didn’t have a big impact on my life.  Oh, of course I knew that Michael Phelps won all those gold medals, which I think made Mark Spitz spitting mad.  I knew that Kara Lawson won the gold with the Women’s Basketball team, and, well, I admit to following the adventures of Kari and Misty.

But as for the rest of the affair in Beijing (wasn’t it called Peiping at one time?), I know more about the air pollution, the destruction of 700 year old neighborhoods, and displacement of hundreds of businesses than the sports themselves.  The parts of the Olympics I did see, I saw only by accident.

It’s not that I’m against sports.  I like them.  But watching men and women running, straining, working so hard to make it to some finish line seems too much like work, to me.  I have to say, the speed walking looks downright painful.

I much prefer the Winter Olympics.  Now, that’s fun to watch.  Careening down steep slopes on magical skis, speeding through tunnels of ice in a bullet of a sled, tilted parallel to the ground on skates while spinning in circles…that’s exhilarating.

The first Olympics I can remember were held in Helsinki, Finland in the summer, with the winter games in Oslo.  That was back in the days when the Winter and Summer Olympics were held in the same year.  My friend Chuck and I were sports-crazy high school students then, and we avidly followed every sport…even Roller Derby.

There were many memorable Olympics, made so by the location in many cases.  Exotic places like Tokyo, Mexico City and Barcelona.  My all time favorite was Los Angeles in 1984, capped by Lionel Richie with the final song of the celebratory night, All Night Long. What a night that was, and what a wonderful feeling.

It was quite different in Munich in 1972 when Palestinian terrorists brutally shot and killed 11 Israeli athletes.  That cast a pall over the Olympics that year, as did the bombing in Atlanta, and the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, replaced by a fractured event called the “Freedom Games”.

In 1976, the Olympics were held in Montreal, and in order to pay for them, The Canadians gave us something that could be an eternal legacy…The Lottery.  The Canadians finally fully paid off that debt in 2006.

But as I said, my all time favorite year was 1984, the last year they conducted the Winter and Summer Olympics in the same year.  The Winter Games were held in Sarajevo in what was then Yugoslavia.  And I was there.  It was a tremendous experience.  We had an entire broadcast suite in the new broadcast facilities, right next to the big boys of NBC and CBS.

Not only were the Games themselves fun, but so was soaking up the history of that city where an assassins gunshot started the First World War.

A few years later, it was sad to watch the market place in the center of town get raked with rockets and gun fire.  The historic streets I had walked were used as sight lines, and people who ventured into those lines were frequently shot dead.

They were buried in the “greens”, areas of grass between the groupings of apartment buildings originally built as the “Olympic Village” and later turned over to the citizens of the city.

So the 2008 Olympics are over, and according to reports, the closing ceremonies were an international hit.

Now, it’s on to Vancouver for the Winter Games in 2010.  I’m getting my toque and heading for Whistler.