On and On Till the Break of Dawn

Covering the Winter Olympics is a full contact sport – and you should see some of the people it puts you in contact with. I’m not talking about the reps who don’t return your phone calls and the elbowing for tape recorder/question access – I’m talking about the fact that all of the press pens (bizarrely enough they’re called the “Mixed Zone”) seem to be solid sheets of ice. Yesterday at the women’s snowboarding – quite possibly the most awesome sport I have ever watched, but more on that later – I watched a reporter slip and sprain his hip, and another crashed straight into me. This morning at the first half of the men’s combined, I crept along the ice like a child hugging the edge of the skating rink. It didn’t help me feel like any more of a sports reporter, let me tell you.

I started this post hours ago, planning to write about the joy of watching snowboarding yesterday and then interviewing Shaun White, the Olympic gold medalist. It was one of the increasingly rare days I enjoy my job. Today isn’t one of those days. I spent a day and a half organizing an interview and photo shoot that was a pain to get only to have my colleague – the more senior correspondent – swoop in and take it at the last second. And have the nerve to ask me for my questions. He already gets to cover most of the marquee events, and because he’s based in the city itself, he has none of the logistical headaches that I have. I wish I were one of those people who could just let things go, but I can’t.

I wrote the preceding two paragraphs on Tuesday, and I’m feeling only slightly better. I never ended up posting because Ted Ligety took the gold at about 9 p.m. Italy time, and I scrambled to interview him and his parents – interviews that ended up on the cutting room floor. (I also had to stay up until 7:30 a.m. closing stories, so yesterday was a blur.) And though I specifically told my editors that Shaun White never said dude in my interview with him – except once, when he was quoting someone else – somehow dude ended up in our aren’t-these-dudes-cool story. Yikes. Nothing less hip (or more embarrassing) than wide-eyed-wonder. Ugh.

Last night – in fact, right after bumping into a post-competition Jeremy Bloom (wearing a Jeremy Bloom baseball cap, of all things) – I made the vow to only eat chocolate every other day. (Vow had nothing to do with Jeremy Bloom, though). Last night – one of only two sit-down meals I have had in my week and a half in Italy – I had chocolate and today I had a chocolate pecan pie Luna bar, which I’m thinking surely shouldn’t count as actual chocolate. As a fellow journalist and I keep joking, we’re in a country known for its great (fresh) food, and we are all subsisting on American chemically made substances: Balance bars, Luna bars, and Power Bars. Even if we hit the vending machines we get more American chemicals: No Italian chocolate, just Twix and Mars bars. What’s up with that?