Olympic co-stars are mom and dad
THE MOM had already hugged the dad and received congratulations from people to her right, left and behind her, then she moved along the fence line. There had to be a break in the mesh, a gate, a way to get from where she stood to where she desperately needed to stand.
“Excuse me,” said Boran Yun Kim, directly to me. “How do I get to my daughter?”
I was standing on the right side of the fence, the side where Chloe Kim had just won gold. And because I wore a media credential, I must have looked official.
“That way,” I told her. “Go that way.”
She disappeared back into the crowd.
The only people at the Pyeongchang Winter Games who receive more attention from the cameras than the athletes are the athletes’ parents and sometimes the race is close.
Almost any Olympian’s story includes support from parents, sometimes to over-the-top degrees.
Mikaela Shiffrin’s mother, for instance, has travelled the world with her ski racer daughter, 22, and serves as one of her coaches, always by her side.
That sounds extreme and it is. But every Olympic family has some sort of story of a detour taken to help realise a dream.
So when the team is named, here comes the next detour. It could be to Russia, Brazil or South Korea. It doesn’t matter. The parents are coming.
“If she was going to be here,” said Mark Caldwell, “we were going to be here.”
Caldwell’s daughter, Ashley, is a freestyle skier who competes in aerials, which involves jumping and twisting and, most importantly, landing properly after the jumping, flipping and twisting.
Caldwell and his wife Leslie, who originally raised Ashley in Ashburn, Virginia, brought Ashley’s three siblings from their home in Houston. They went to Vancouver. They went to Sochi. They know the drill – and how it plays back home.
In Vancouver in 2010, “NBC brought us right up front,” Mark Caldwell said. “They had a camera pretty much right in our face the whole time. And when I say ‘right in our face’, I mean maybe two feet away from our faces.”
The father of Durban’s Olympic winner, Chad le Clos, Bert, became a celebrity in 2012 during the Summer Olympics when he growled: “Unbelievable. Look at him. That boy is beautiful.”
The sheer, unaffected warmth of his fatherly celebration became an immediate symbol of the London Games. The next morning, Bert found himself at the top of the news agenda, Tim White of The Telegraph wrote.
The parents become characters in this reality show, too. Except the reality isn’t always like this. The journeys to the Olympics aren’t about mingling with your kids at their most significant moments.
“The US team made that very clear,” said Elaine Marino, whose daughter, Julia, is a snowboarder competing in two events. “Don’t think you’re going to be seeing her every day. It doesn’t work like that.”
Elaine Marino and her husband, John, travelled with a large family contingent for Julia’s Olympic debut, which came last weekend in the slopestyle competition, an event that was essentially neutered by high winds and should have been postponed.
Which brings up another element for Olympic parents: what if your daughter isn’t safe?
“She said before the event: ‘I didn’t come all this way to take a safety run,’ ” said John Marin.
So the Marino clan sat at the bottom of the hill. The wind howled. It’s one thing to watch this harrowing competition develop from the comfort of your couch. But what if you’re standing in the gale and that’s your child?
“Not many female riders go inverted like Julia does,” Elaine Marino said. “When you go inverted and an updraft gets you, it’s like you’re on a sailboard. I was nervous. That’s a scary thought.”
Nervous
That experience was particular to the Marinos. But pick a day at the Olympics: somewhere a parent is biting a lip or clenching a fist.
“I just hope my family will be able to keep their eyes open while I’m skiing,” said freestyle skier Brita Sigourney. Four years ago, Sigourney competed in Vancouver. When she was done, her own sister admitted she didn’t watch the run. “She was too nervous.”
Four years ago in Sochi, Devin Logan made a slopestyle skiing run that produced a silver medal. She found out afterwards that her mother had been facing the other way the entire time, watching not her daughter but the scores that came up on the board.
When Logan reached the bottom of the course, she didn’t know that. But she wanted to see her mother – badly.
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” she said. “And then I hugged my mom and it was just waterworks. It’s just something about your parents that you can lose it.”
Those tears are what NBC – and, if we’re honest, the rest of us – will focus on. But think of the little things, too.
Mark Caldwell came to support Ashley, who arrived as a medal contender and didn’t advance to the finals in aerials. But the entire family got pictures, provided support and bonded.
“We’re making memories,” he said.
Julia Marino spent Friday quarantined with the flu. She is qualifying in the big air competition, which is making its Olympic debut tomorrow. But her needs before that were more basic.
“She said: ‘Mom, could you bring me some chicken soup?’ which is so sweet,” Elaine Marino said. “It’s comforting to know we’re here, even though we’re not really with her.”
Back at the half-pipe snowboard competition, Kim needed to see Chloe. When she finally found her, they embraced as a sea of photographers and reporters crushed in. Those post-medal embraces are what you’ll see back home, what we’ll write about.
But there are a million little parental moments about which we have no idea – the kid who wants chicken soup, the mom who can’t watch, the dad who’s trying to get the best photo. That’s a significant part of the Olympic experience. – The Washington Post