Usually, the Olympics are all about trials and triumphs.
The athletes' trials and triumphs.
Not this time. At the XXII Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, an unofficial event has joined the likes of medal-awarding newbies “slopestyle” and team figure skating:
The Sochi Spectator Perservere-athon:
"It's not for the meek," Eddie Meyers of Douglasville acknowledged last week. Asked if he was looking forward to heading to Sochi soon to watch his daughter, Elana, attempt to better her 2010 Olympic bobsled bronze medal finish, the ex-Atlanta Falcon and Naval Academy grad chuckled. "I'm looking forward to getting there."
As the Winter Olympics reaches its midpoint today, Meyers is among a group of hardy metro-Atlantans who’ve refused to let the host city’s relatively remote setting, snowy outdoor venues or supposed bullseye status for terrorists prevent them from experiencing this Games live and in-person.
“It feels safe,” Nicholas Wolaver wrote in an email from Sochi, his ninth Olympics. “There do not seem to be any more security force members here than any other Games since 9/11,” the Atlanta public relations executive, who’s blogging about his experiences (olympicringsandotherthings.blogspot.com), continued. “There are screening points similar to airport security, but none in a surprise location.”
Maybe that depends upon your definition of “surprise.”
“I rode the train into town, along the coastline, and you have a soldier about every 200 yards,” former Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games bigwig Charlie Battle said by phone after last week’s Opening Ceremonies. “I was worried that it might be a little oppressive. I don’t get that sense, but there’s just a lot of it everywhere.”
Metro Atlantans working and playing at the Games should be a given. The host city of the 1996 Centennial Summer Olympics and the home of the Games's big kahuna of corporate supporters, Coca-Cola, tends to have a major footprint at most Olympics.
Clearly, though, Sochi is not most Olympics.
"When all this terror stuff came out, (advisories) came out saying things like, 'Don't travel there alone,'" said Lisa Cervantes of Peachtree City, whose son, Christopher Kyle Carr, competition in short track speedskating began Thursday. "I thought, 'I don't know anyone who has ten grand to drop. This is an expensive Olympics."
In part, that’s because this is also the no-direct-flights-to-Sochi-from-anywhere-in-the-U.S. Olympics. Thanks to an anonymous donor and money raised via GoFundMe.com, Cervantes and one of her adult daughters took off this past Monday on a four-leg odyssey that included a lengthy layover in Moscow before their scheduled arrival in Sochi on Tuesday. At 22 hours, Meyers’s scheduled itinerary would be similarly grueling.
In Sochi, there’s been high-profile press griping about computers supposedly being hacked. About doorknobs gone missing and toilets not flushing in some of the city’s brand new hotels.
Mostly, though, it’s the very real threat of terrorism that sets these Olympics apart. Especially since 9/11, every host city has worried about a deadly attack during the Games.
But Sochi’s location in the Caucasus Mountains region near demonstrably violent Islamist and anti-Russian separatist groups have led global security experts to deem this the most dangerous Games ever. Americans are being warned: Don’t wear too much red, white and blue. Do fear the possibility of explosives being hidden in toothpaste tubes on Sochi-bound planes.
“I was really apprehensive,” Cervantes admitted last week. The married mother of four contacted a pilot friend who flies all over the world and asked him point blank, “Should I be afraid?
“He said, ‘I have a (pilot) friend who’s shuffling people back and forth between Sochi and Moscow and everything’s fine. Go and have the time of your life,’” Cervantes continued. “I felt really good about that.”
Indeed, Sochi holds definite charms for our locals there. The weather’s turned out to be more Summer Olympics-like: With daily highs in the mid-50s to low 60’s, what Wolaver calls “no jacket required” Sochi is the reverse of bundled up Atlanta. Battle, who advised Sochi on its winning host bid, is positively gobsmacked by the “Extreme Makeover” version of the city he first visited in 2005.
“I can’t describe how primitive it was — old (ski) chair lifts in the mountains like in North Carolina in the 1960s and no hotels to speak of,” marveled Battle, who now sees a city transformed into a winter and summer resort complete with highways, railway tracks, lodging and sports venues. “What they have built in 6-1/2 years is mindboggling.”
No more mindboggling than where Cervantes finds herself physically and emotionally these days. Injuries prevented her son from making it to the previous two Olympics, but he called her as he walked into the Opening Ceremonies.
“I said to him what I say to everyone about the magic of what you’ve achieved,” Cervantes said before heading to Sochi herself. “It was so loud he really couldn’t hear anything. I just screamed, ‘I love you!’”
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