Ok, he is the guy who authored "For One More Day".
I didn't notice this till I finished reading the whole article.
The Olympics isn't only about winning a medal. This article reminds me about the humanity and sportsmanship that made Olympics the greatest games to grace the world.
I was in tears after finished reading, this guy's good.
http://www.parade.com/articles/editions/2008/edition_08-03-2008/2Heart_of_the_Games
The Heart of the Games
By Mitch Albom
Published:
August 3, 2008
If you want to find the best stories at the Olympics, look in the
corners, away from the spotlight. For me, in covering the Olympics over
the last 24 years, the lesser-lit places have been where the most
memorable moments took place.
Sure,
TV always hypes the favorites. We are already being bombarded with
big-name expectations in Beijing, such as swimming star Michael Phelps
or basketball’s Kobe Bryant. But, personally, I soured on big-name
stuff back in Barcelona in 1992, after the Dream Team’s Michael Jordan,
who earned millions endorsing Nike, refused to get on the medal stand
if he had to wear a Reebok sweatsuit.
“They can mail me the medal,” he told the press.
Check, please.
Thankfully,
those same Olympics provided me with maybe the best sports moment I’ve
ever covered—a much less-hyped one. And that taught me one of several
lessons about where to seek the heart and soul of the Games: Look to
the losers.
The story I refer to happened one afternoon far
from the Dream Team hysteria, in Barcelona’s Olympic stadium, when a
British sprinter named Derek Redmond pulled a hamstring midway through
a 400-meter heat. He fell to the track as if he’d been shot. His
Olympics were over.
But his moment had just begun.
As
Derek waved off the medics and tried to hop to the finish, his father,
Jim Redmond, a heavyset machine-shop owner, burst from the stands and
ran onto the track. He somehow reached his son, who buried his head in
his father’s shoulder to hide his tears. Then the two of them, the
father supporting the son, inched their way to the finish line so that
Derek could say he finished the race. The crowd rose for the
slow-hobbling men and roared as loudly as it would for any champion.
Later, Jim Redmond was asked how he made it onto the track.
“You don’t need accreditation in an emergency,” the father said.
Since
most Olympians have trained a lifetime for a single moment, defeat can
tell as rich a story as victory. In 1988, at the Seoul Games, American
boxer Anthony Hembrick sat stunned, crying, a sweatshirt hood over his
head, after learning that his coach had read the schedule wrong, they’d
missed the bus and arrived too late for his first bout. The coaches
tried to tape him up quickly. They tried to argue. No luck. A forfeit
was declared. Hembrick’s Olympics were over before he threw a punch.
How
about runner Mary Decker Slaney, who missed the 1976 Games due to
injury, the 1980 Games due to boycott, and who finally, in 1984 in Los
Angeles, was a gold-medal favorite competing before her home crowd in
the 3000 meters? Just past the halfway mark, she got tangled with a
barefoot, teenage British runner named Zola Budd and tumbled to the
infield, grabbing her thigh and bursting into tears. Her dream was
shattered. Four years later, in Seoul, Slaney tried the same race again
and got brushed and stumbled and lost. Dream over, again. One of our
greatest female distance runners ever. Yet defeat, sadly, was the star
of her Olympic story.
Defeat meant something different to a
young marathoner named Aguida Amaral, from war-torn East Timor, where
violence left her home burned and her running shoes ruined. In Sydney
in 2000, she had to compete in a plain white jersey under the Olympic
flag. Near the end of the 26-mile race, despite being more than 47
minutes behind the winner, she was so grateful to have made it that,
after running into the stadium, she dropped to her knees in prayer. An
official gently informed her that she still had to circle the track to
finish, so she rose to cheers and did so, then kissed the ground.
By the way, Amaral finished second from last, proving that the best stories are often far from the medal stand.
They
are also far from the well-known arenas of gymnastics, swimming, and
track and field. For example, in 1988, during a sailing competition, a
Canadian named Lawrence Lemieux was in second place in a race when he
spotted two sailors from Singapore who’d been thrown into the water by
the rough winds and waves. He veered off course, pulled them onto his
boat and waited for rescuers. It cost him any chance of winning. But it
gave new meaning to Olympic sportsmanship.
In 1996, badminton
gave us Kevin Han, who left a prestigious athletic status in China to
be with his divorced father in New York City. Han worked in a Chinese
restaurant and as a bicycle delivery boy, getting banged by cars and
even mugged once before finally, 18 months later, finding his way back
to the net. He eventually became a U.S. citizen and competed in the
Atlanta Games. I asked him what he cherished most about being an
American, and he said, “Freedom.”
When did badminton get so inspiring?
In
Sydney, the rarely seen sport of Greco-Roman wrestling offered the
magical tale of a beefy Wyoming dairy farmer named Rulon Gardner, who
had never finished higher than fifth in a world championship. He was
pitted, in the gold-medal match, against a Russian legend named
Aleksandr Karelin, “The Siberian Bear,” who hadn’t lost a match in 13
years. Thirteen years? Gardner somehow scored the first point on him
and held Karelin off for what felt like forever. Finally, with eight
seconds left, the mighty Russian dropped his hands in surrender.
Gardner took the gold and became an American icon—from Greco-Roman wrestling.
Who says that you need to understand a sport to find a hero?
In
the Beijing Games, we’ll see many inspiring photos. But remember,
sometimes a snapshot tells an entire story; sometimes it is only a
keyhole. In 1988, there was the picture of South Korean boxer Byun
Jong-Il, sitting alone in an empty ring after they turned the lights
out. The full story was a controversial decision an hour earlier that
led to bottles and chairs being thrown, and to Korean boxing officials
attacking a referee in a melee.
There was also a photo of Soviet
gymnast Dmitri Bilozerchev, at those same Seoul Games, wearing a bronze
medal. The full story was that doctors had never expected him to walk
again after he’d shattered his leg in 40 places in a drunk-driving
incident.
There was the image of a Nigerian woman named Glory
Alozie, flying over the hurdles in the Sydney Games en route to a
silver medal. What the picture didn’t show was the heavy heart she
carried over those hurdles, having lost the love of her life—her
sprinter fiancé, Hyginus Anugo—just a few weeks earlier in that same
city, after he was killed by a speeding car while running to get snacks
for his teammates.
So the Olympics are this massive, colorful
tapestry. And simple math tells us there will be more than 10,000
athletes competing in Beijing, and relatively few of them will make it
to your TV screen. But every Olympian has an Olympic story. Sometimes
they end on a medal stand. And sometimes you have to look a bit harder
to find gold. Trust me. It is well worth the search.
Sports columnist Mitch Albom is the author of the best-sellers “Tuesdays With Morrie” and “For One More Day.”
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