The Rest of the Story

On March 26, my longtime Olympic friend Brian cornered me (a second time) nudging for a conclusion to the mid-Games cliffhanger posted from PyeongChang in February.

"Time flies when you're having fun," I shrugged.

In our memberships with the International Society of Olympic Historians, Brian and I occasionally summon our inner Paul Harvey, the on air storyteller who, for years, wove detailed color into his radio broadcasts. 

At Brian's request, finally now on April 27 (started April 12), here is the rest of the story:

On the day of my mid-February PyeongChang post, I had a second news story in the works to follow-up the pin trading tales of the Games' first week. 

In that one afternoon at the Main Press Center, it was fun to meet not only the Team USA women's figure skaters at their first press conference of the Games, but also a British reporter I nicknamed "Stephen Merchant's doppelganger" seated near my blogging station. 

The incomplete post -- including answers to my questions posed to Mirai Nagasu, Karen Chen and Bradie Tennell -- was drafted under the headline "Hello, Ladies" in reference and reverence to Merchant's short-lived HBO series, of which I was a big fan (as big a supporter of ladies' Olympic figure skating). 

But here's the deal: I caught a nasty head cold during the middle weekend of PyeongChang, and by the afternoon in question the congestion and coughing was rough. Dog tired, facing a 45-minute snowy mountain commute, and an early morning slated for the next day (to attend figure skating in coastal Gangneung), it made sense to grab a bite, call it a night early and catch some ZZZ's in my AirBNB. 

This plan worked except for sleeping in the next morning and getting a call from my AirBNB hosts who wanted to present me with a going away/New Year's gift. By the time we connected in person, the day's schedule was pretty much shot except for meeting a friend for an evening women's hockey match. 

Illness persisted for three more days, with better health not at all aided by my attendance at a string of outdoor (and Arctic cold/windy) events including a rescheduled downhill ski event and cross-country ski competition. 

Then there was the packing process including nearly a thousand new Olympic pins in need of sorting and two-week's worth of dirty laundry. I would have gladly traded pins with anyone who could read the Korean script on the AirBNB's new clothing washer-dryer. 

The search for new lodging (one-night only at the sweetest Art Hotel on the planet ... resting in a giant bowl-shaped bed) then getting there (a long drive south of Gangneung) devoured a day.

And then the ultimate distraction from blogging arrived ... from Russia with love. 

You see, during Sochi 2014 I made and new friend while attending the Cultural Olympiad concert performed by American jazz musician Brian Lynch. When the Grammy-winning trumpeter asked the mostly-Russian audience whether they knew the location of Milwaukee (where his family was watching the Sochi concert via Skype), I hollered from the balcony my approval of the Wisconsin city much to the amazement of the packed house, the band leader on stage and to a Moscow-based interpreter/translator seated on my row. 

The Russia-born linguist, a woman named Valentina, spoke fluent English then and now, and after four years of friendly Facebook messaging, in January 2018 she accepted my invitation to "meet me in PyeongChang" like good folks sometimes do in St. Louis. 

So the morning after the Art Hotel and viewing its museum (including a Pinocchio collection) and expansive modern sculpture garden, I took the speed train to Seoul's airport to greet Valentina then bring her back to the Olympic city.

Valentina proved to be a very funny and fun-loving travel companion. On our first day of re-acquaintance, she opted to join me for a Korean Cultural Olympiad event, which turned out to be a musical version of a popular folk tale.

The program hinted "audience participation" in the second act, and guess who got picked to go on stage and perform a Korean "fan dance" in female costume?

Answer clue: It wasn't Valentina. 

She instead delighted in snapping photos and video proof of my on-stage humiliation (the mostly female cast dressed me in the finest Korean silks and placed me center stage for a "fan dance" to the glee of, well, everyone but moi.

After the show, Valentina and I shared hearty belly laughs while losing count of the middle-aged Korean women smiling and proclaiming me "the star" of the performance.

Sorry, ladies. No autographs!

Though there was no time to blog about it, the next day my Muscovite buddy and I trekked to the furthest-afield venue to experience the women's ski event at which Lindsey Vonn ended her Olympic career and Mikaela Shiffrin earned a bronze.

Valentina was a natural at securing blog-friendly photos of Slovakia's yak-like fans, and the two of us managed to get her into the venue press center for Shiffrin's press conference. Kinda fun to get in the last question for the two-time gold medalist and her approach to the Beijing 2022 Games (I will post this interview at a future date). 

A long bus ride, a lost mobile phone, countless pin trades, two days and at least two Korean barbecue meals later -- as well as a 90-minute drive down the South Korean coast to meet V's longtime mentor (an interpreter and his wife who worked at the MPC for the Olympic Athletes of Russia), and it was already time for Valentina and I to hit the PyeongChang Olympic Superstore, attend the Closing Ceremony and then drive 3.5 hours back to Seoul.

Between work assignments, venue visits, meals and drive times, I think we averaged about four hours of sleep per night, making for one exhausted Olympic blogger by the Monday after Games' end.

Valentina must have enjoyed my company, too, for she said "meet me in ... Istanbul" as a follow-up experience. We're both flying in to the Turkish tourism capital on May Day.

Before our reunion on the other side (west end) of Asia, there's one upcoming 2018 Olympic experience yet to unfurl: The USOC's announcement of the Team USA Awards presented by Dow in Washington on April 26, followed by the athletes' visit to The White House just like in 2016.

Of course my credential request is submitted, and here's hoping for more time to blog this month following a visit to D.C.

And that is ... the rest of the story.

Photos by Nicholas Wolaver and Valentina Kucheriavenko

Crossing South Korea by Rental Car

View from my first kilometer of solo driving in South Korea.

"It's going to be OK ... there, there!"

Words to live by -- and drive across South Korea by -- as spoken by the Avis car rental attendant, Jay, to this Olympic blogger as I burst into tears of anxiety around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday. 

Why the fuss? 

My first driving in Asia experience: A 3.5 hour whopper that ended with glee!

Though I had pondered an Olympic car rental for PyeongChang a few weeks ago while stateside, actually signing the contract and accepting the keys turned into a whole other story. 

By last night I was so anxious about the driving option (a DIY alternative to surrendering control to the Olympic transportation network and taxis/Uber), this writer logged almost no zzzz's Tuesday night in the Seoul hotel. 

Confidence was intact until the flight from Atlanta on Sunday, during which a fellow traveler who resides here said, "absolutely do not drive in Korea ... the drivers are crazier than New York or Rome!"

Then yesterday, on the Seoul Metro, a trio of Chicago-based business men echoed the anti-driving sentiment with comments like, "There are 50 million reasons not to drive in South Korea ... the other drivers!"

In the pre-dawn hours today, I psyched myself up reciting "if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, it's up to you, just drive to PyeongChang ... da, da-da-da!" 

It worked, sort of. 

After crying with the rental car attendant, who (thankfully) programmed the on board GPS with accuracy, I also cried with the gas station attendant, the first toll booth lady and in the direction of the eastbound driver in a Bentley next to me in the lone Seoul traffic jam we traversed around 7:30 a.m.

By 8 a.m., however, confidence reigned and my appetite returned, eventually stopping for coffee and croissants at a Highway 50 rest area about half-way across the Korean Peninsula. 

Sidebar: A fun culinary discovery came in the form of a cream-puff by Olympic sponsor Beard Papa's, offering a "cheer UP!" five-ringed pastry in time for the Games. 

By 10:30 I was parking at the Holiday Inn Alpensia -- home of the Main Press Center (MPC) -- and checking in at the Team USA office for the first time. 

Further up the mountain I also checked into the PyeongChang Grass Fragrance Pension, a super-rural private home turned hostel for ski bums and Olympic bloggers, not to mention a security manager for Worldwide Olympic sponsor Bridgestone (we both discovered the pension via Hotels.com). The pension has its own YouTube Channel!

An enormous cat greeted me in the parking lot, and I was so very happy to land in my heated pension mattress and enjoy the proprietor's cappuccino in my room.

The owner/barista also served up a hot baked potato from her garden, roasted in her cedar-fueled pot-bellied stove!

There will be more driving and more stress, for sure. 

But today was a win. Tomorrow I'll post more about the MPC. 

Must catch up on zzz's.

Photos by Nicholas Wolaver

View from the PyeongChang Grass Fragrance Pension balcony.

Over The Wall

Those final days in Vancouver ... they each remain a fantastic, psychedelic blur.

After posting about hitting the wall weeks ago, the next day (the final Thursday of the Games), brought a great blend of work successes (interviews for clients), a ticketing coup (row three seats for the women's figure skating final for less than an arm and a leg), three nights of red carpet interviews at Club Bud (disclosure: a client of the firm where I work) and as much pin trading as I could muster.

Some old friends arrived in Vancouver, too, so some blogging time went away in order to catch up and create new Olympic memories.

There was a midnight visit to the Main Press Center (MPC) and International Broadcast Center (IBC), tying up loose ends with new friends at work and around town, then packing up from the Marinaside condo (realizing now I have yet to post details of that experience ... and dozens more experiences). Spending an hour at Sochi House, then a Saturday afternoon and evening in the Olympic Village residential zone, were icing in the cake of a fabulous yet extremely exhausting four days of Olympic wrap-up.

Could blog for days about the Closing Ceremony, too (seated under the stage where Avril Lavigne and Michael Buble performed). And I will in good time. There are gold medalist and other surprise interviews yet to be formatted and posted.

There was some big ice hockey game one day, too, wasn't there?

Leaving Vancouver was a HUGE BUMMER. I absolutely love and miss being there.

The commute back to Atlanta -- starting March 2 at 5 a.m. at YVR with landings in Seattle, Dallas and (at long last) ATL at 9:30 p.m. after several consecutive weeks with only 2-3 hours of nightly sleep -- made for a soupy/foggy first few days back (it was indeed good to be home, too -- torn between two cities, now). There are two steamer trunk-sized bags of loot with a label "for eBay" staring at me from the corner of my home office. :-)

It hardly seems possible that only a week after the layover in Dallas on March 2, work travel took me back to "Big D" on March 10. It's nice to sort of ease into a spring of busy days that, by comparison, will be calm and steady.

Was it all a dream?

Vancouver marked my seventh Olympic Games. It is going down among the best. No credentials? No problem.

I keep thinking of John Furlong's astounding speeches of the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, and the music of the Games. Paraphrasing Furlong, Canada's Winter Games will certainly be remembered for generations.

Only 862 Days to London.

Exploring The Olympic City

The last 72 hours were steady busy to intense, sensational to inspiring.

Saturday started with the move six blocks east (yes, "Moving On Up!" to the eastside) from a hotel to a new abode on Marinaside Crescent at a company-rented condo facing False Creek and the Olympic Village (unbelievable!).

Completed a bit of pin trading that afternoon before trekking to Horseshoe Bay for a ferry ride to the otherworldly gorgeous Bowen Island, where our Vancouver office GM and his wife hosted a client dinner at Blue Eyed Marys, a small, family-owned fine dining establishment where the menu changes monthly (delicious!).

On the ferry out to the island, one of the island's local politicos (and really nice guy) was on the front deck sharing his torchbearer story from "up north, near Whistler" as families clamored to shake his hand and pose with or hold his Vancouver 2010 Olympic Torch. Very exciting to witness the spontaneous curiosity and awe of the kids of all ages checking out the local Olympic connection.

During the ferry ride back to West Vancouver, the sky was filled with dozens of synchronized searchlights (each night since Thursday there have been more and more searchlights shining upward across the city). "It's beginning to look a lot like Olym-pics" we sang in the car.

Super Bowl Sunday was a day of exploration, starting with a Sky Train ride down near the Main Press Center (MPC) and International Broadcast Center (IBC) on the northern waterfront -- what a gorgeous building that convention center turned out to be (it was a big hole in the ground when first I visited Vancouver in 2006).

From the IBC, another train got me to the Rusky Dom Sochi 2014 Russia House at Vancouver's iconic Science World. The place was under heavy transformation into what will likely be a hot ticket destination during Vancouver's Games.

I could not help but hum Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" while looking back across False Creek to the Edelman Olympic condo! The Olympic Village (just south of Science World) looks spectacular!

Also checked out the True North Media House, a social media centre for Vancouver's Games, which appeared to have a bit of work due to prepare for their planned opening this week.

Monday was an intense day of media pitching, calls, research and follow ups on a variety of fronts. Some of this work was from the desk, but we're also hitting the streets and meeting (or getting reacquainted with) an astounding number of international media across downtown. Monday afternoon also afforded me time with a national radio contributor front the U.S. as we both went through the MPC/IBC accreditation application procedures, visited The Bay (a client, where throngs of shoppers and media are in pursuit of Olympic gear) and lunch in the Vancouver's historic Gastown District.

Monday night was the first night all three Games roommates were under one roof at the condo, with our first house dinner (delicious vegetarian soup and sandwiches and Bailey's-infused hot chocolate) capping three days of adventures.

Tuesday was bookended with the Olympic Torch Relay.

At dawn, KING-TV and KONG-TV of Seattle aired live coverage of The Flame's arrival at the International Peace Arch on the British Columbia-Washington border.

During the day, more media pitching, networking at a press conference with Vancouver's Mayor at (client) Vancouver LiveCity Yaletown, a walk through of the B.C. Media Centre at Robson Square, more media and client calls. Whew!

And tonight brought the arrival of the Olympic Torch Relay to the City of Richmond and "The O Zone" Olympic party area (definitely worth a visit during the Games -- I think my eyes spotted a Dutch House on site).

Tens of thousands of locals gathered on what was, from what I could tell, a high school track and field area transformed into an outdoor concert and party venue. After some interesting live music and a lot of jockeying for a decent camera position, the Olympic flame reached The O Zone via torchbearer Rick Hansen (a client), Canada's world famous "Man In Motion."

If you don't know Rick Hansen, you should!

On several short lists of Canadian favorites who might ignite the Olympic Cauldron on Friday night at B.C. Place, during the 1980s Hansen won Paralympic gold medals before hitting the road -- a LONG road of more than 25,000 miles across 34 nations -- to raise millions of dollars for spinal cord injury research.

More importantly, Hansen championed a movement to create an inclusive and accessible world for the disabled. His leadership during the last 25 years brought more than $200 million to the cause, but in his words tonight in Richmond, the journey is not over yet and his best work is still in front of him.

Well said!

In case you are wondering: Yes, that song from the film "St. Elmo's Fire" was inspired by and written for Rick Hansen's tour (once you learn about Rick, the lyrics really do take on a whole new meaning with so much more importance than any scenes of a youthful Demi Moore, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez). And during March and the Winter Paralympics in Vancouver, the Man In Motion 25th Anniversary is on March 21.

Here's to another 25 years!

And here's to less than three more days and nights to the Big O!