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Olympic village is center of "wow"
By
Bryan Burwell
Of the
Post-Dispatch
08/13/2004
ATHENS,
Greece - By Wednesday afternooon, the athletes' village in the northern suburb
of Lekanes was a kaleidoscope of Olympic humanity and national colors as the
home for most of the 10,500 athletes began to fill up to capacity. All over the
place, it felt like a grand human carnival.
Brightly colored sweat suits from every conceivable nation were on display as
athletes of every shape and size strolled down the wide, tree-lined village
plazas and mingled in the various dining halls, Internet cafes and training
complexes.
"It was like my head was on a swivel," American diver Justin Wilcock said.
"Everywhere you looked you saw something or someone that made you go, 'Wow!' "
This rambling village is the epicenter of the Olympic experience. Every variety
of Olympic dreams and dreamers can be found here. This is a place where a boxer
from Belize can mingle easily with a runner from Romania. This is a place where
a multimillionaire, highly decorated athletic icon can share a cafe au lait - or
even a breathless passing moment - with a wide-eyed Olympic neophyte.
Shortly after the U.S. women's basketball team checked into the village, for
instance, first-time Olympian Swin Cash - who is trying to add an Olympic gold
medal to her NCAA and WNBA championship hardware - found herself behaving like a
giddy school girl.
"I'm just walking along minding my business, and I look up and there's (U.S.
tennis star and resident heartthrob) Andy Roddick just walking right by me,"
Cash said, giggling. "I was like 'Ohhhhhhh . . . MY gawwwd! It's Andy
Roddick!' You always figure guys like that would be surrounded by these huge
entourages, but there he was just walking all by himself, baseball cap on
backward, wearing flip flops and shorts."
There is no better place to discover the relative nature of the Olympic
experience than in the village. For every Michael Phelps who is supposed to win
seven Olympic medals in the swimming competition (and who, quite frankly, knows
he might be regarded as a "failure" if he wins only five golds), there are a
thousand more faceless athletes who embody a certain fun-and-games aspect of
Olympic competition.
"You're going to find a wide range of Olympic experiences here," U.S. diver
Kimiko Soldati said. "Some athletes won't be able to thrive under the pressure
of expectations. They will find the expectations a terrible burden, and those
are the people who won't fare very well. Then there are the others who can't
survive unless they have that pressure. We've all seen them. The expectations
don't bother them at all. In fact, it's like an emotional fuel to them. Dealing
with the pressure fires them up."
We will find out quickly which one Phelps is. The 19-year-old from Towson, Md.,
the latest U.S. swimmer to be tagged with the "next Mark Spitz" label, could
cash in on a $1 million bonus from athletic clothier Speedo if he matches
Spitz's record seven gold medals from the 1972 Munich Games.
That immediately makes his Olympic experience, shall we say, "richer" than
everyone else's.
On Thursday, when an Australian journalist asked Phelps whether winning seven
silver medals would make his Olympic experience a "failure," he sort of
rolled his eyes, shrugged his shoulders and let the question gently evaporate
into the air.
But that is Phelps' Olympic reality. It is beyond a daunting task. It is
practically impossible. "I couldn't imagine being him," U.S. Olympic basketball
player Lisa Leslie said. "I hate to say it, but yeah, if he got seven silvers,
he probably would feel like a failure. That's just the nature of the beast."
Yet to most of the 10,500 athletes, the beauty of the Olympic experience is the
17-day long athletic party. It really doesn't matter how well you dance, just as
long as you're invited.
After all these years, tennis living legend Martina Navratilova has made her
first trip to the Olympic Games. Long past her athletic prime, Navratilova, 47,
is a semiretired doubles specialist basking in her greatness and loving her
Greek Olympic holiday.
"I've already gotten into the swing of trading Olympic pins thanks to Venus
Williams," Navratilova said. "Yesterday when we got to the village, she told me,
'Because you're kind of famous, a lot of people are going to want to take
pictures with you.' So she told me a great way to build up my pin collection,
because this is what she did (in Sydney). When they come up asking for a
picture, tell everybody, 'OK, sure I'll take a picture with you ... but you have
to give me a pin.'"
One of those who swarmed Navratilova was American basketball player Tina
Thompson. "The coolest thing for me was last night as we're standing in line for
processing at the Village and there's Martina just standing in line in front of
me talking to Diana Taurasi, and I'm like, 'Ohhh my gawd, ohhh my gawd!' "
A few seconds later, Thompson and Navratilova were mugging for the camera and
chit-chatting like old buddies. "And it turns out she's just about the coolest
person I've ever met," Thompson said. "She probably had no idea how excited I
was. I was trying to act cool, you know?"
But it didn't take long for Thompson to blow her cool. Fifteen minutes later,
when Navratilova was about to leave, she walked past Thompson.
"Hey, Tina, see you later," Navratilova said.
As Thompson retold the story, her ultra cool veneer melted away. "Like I said, I
was trying to be cool," Thompson said. "I didn't want her to see me
acting goofy, but after she left, I kept nodding my head and thinking, 'Yeah,
Martina called me 'Tina.' ... she knows my first name!
"Now that was very cool."
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