The Overhead Wire Daily | August 7th, 2024 | There are Champions Everywhere
Earlier this month we shared a NYT article about what cities get or haven’t got out of the Olympic games since Barcelona. That city famously revitalized its waterfront in 1992 and regenerated different parts of the city in an attempt to create lasting improvements. They are still building on that success. Since then many cities have spent billions of dollars with some finding limited success such as Beijing and London, and others seeing wasted venues and debt. Athens and Rio the worst hit.
But in Slate, Henry Grabar takes a look at where the investments are happening in France and what that means for some of the poorest neighborhoods like Seine-Saint-Denis. There’s hope that these areas will benefit, but it’s far from guaranteed. We won’t know for a few years whether these games will change the narrative, but I hope they do signal a shift because they currently aren’t sustainable as they’ve been going for cities or the planet.
The next Olympics will be in Los Angeles and I can guarantee you that I will be there for some event. After my trip to London in 2012, I must say that it’s a must see event if you love sports and cities and the mixing of cultures. And by that time I hope that Los Angeles will make good on their promise to make it a car free games.
As an aside, I must say that I’m really proud of US distance runners at these games. They have run with guts and heart and it is in these actions that I tear up as a runner with past Olympic dreams because I know first hand what they have been through to get to the finish line.
I was out on the roads for 70-90 miles a week throughout my high school and college years. What I learned wasn’t just about how to run, but how to see cities and suburbs, as my teammates and I traversed every street and trail within a ten mile radius of the University of Texas and every greenbelt trail in Kingwood Texas and a few in Memorial Park in Houston. I can still smell 6th street on a Sunday morning or feel my legs on Scenic Drive along the Colorado River when I’m walking up a hill here in San Francisco. Some fall days when grass is freshly cut, and there’s a crisp nip in the air, I can feel a race.
I hope people see the Olympics from a human perspective, as a competition not just with other nations who we share this Earth with, but also with ourselves. As the games come to a close I am reminded of a chat some teammates and I had with famous New Zealand track coach Arthur Lydiard over a Shiner Bock just days before he passed away. When asked what makes great runners he just looked at us and said you don’t need to be special, you just need to put in the work to be great. He then told us, “There are champions everywhere”.
***
For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.
