We are staying with relatives who are serious hockey fans. (Yes. In SoCal.) There was never any doubt over what was going up on the big-screen TV from 8:10 p.m. (PST): The women’s hockey gold-medal match pitting the United States and Canada at the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics. And there we sat for four-plus hours, increasingly […]

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Turns out, Tara Lipinski is a fine broadcast analyst at Olympic skating competition. But we might be looking at Michelle Kwan on NBC TV, instead of Lipinski, if the former had won an Olympics gold at some point in her long and productive career. As Lipinski did at Nagano 1998. Lipinski had a much shorter […]

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Not that it matters much anymore, with print journalism in collapse, but for fun we can revisit a topic that would have been of great interest to sports journalists of 10 or 20 years ago: Where is “home” to the latest great athlete? Like, say, Chloe Kim, snowboarding gold-medallist at the Pyeongchang Winter Games? Chloe […]

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I first interviewed Bonny Warner in February of 1984, a week before the Sarajevo Olympics. She grew up in Mount Baldy Village, a hamlet on the shoulder of the mountain, and went to school in San Bernardino County, where our newspaper circulated. So we snapped to attention when we realized that a college kid from […]

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It ought to be, right? Cold. Plenty cold. Unpleasantly cold. It’s the Winter Olympics and we have sports based on snow and ice. Opening Ceremonies for the Pyeongchang Games were held tonight, in South Korea, and it did not look like a shorts-and-T-shirt sort of event, no. Well, duh. It seems the current generation of […]

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The Winter Olympics is an acquired taste. Unless you grew up where winter dominates life. Say, Russia. Norway. Lapland. Buffalo. The Winter Games generally are held in a city/town that is hard to get to (from places where people actually live) and feature a lot of winding mounting roads that either are icy or slushy. […]

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The first paragraphs went like this: “He stands five feet tall. “He weighs 132 pounds. “He can lift 418 pounds over his head. “His name is Naim Suleymanoglu, from Turkey, and pound for pound he is the strongest man in the history of the world.” That was the opening of my story on the featherweight […]

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It’s final. Well, as soon as the rubber-stamp approval of International Olympic Committee voting members next month. But the top guys have agreed with the two cities that bid for the 2024 Games. The 2024 Olympics go to Paris. The 2028 Summer Games go to Los Angeles. Los Angeles will get $1.8 billion in cash […]

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I survived some ridiculous road trips as a professional journalist but nearly all of them were my own damn fault. The Saturday night/Sunday morning back-to-back football road games. (Tempe to Minneapolis by way of Dallas; Tuscaloosa to Houston by way of Atlanta.) Doable. Just. The 730-mile early January drive from San Bernardino to Grand Junction, […]

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I covered the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. (I was a teeny bit too young to see the 1932 L.A. Games, back when the Memorial Coliseum was “only” 11 years old.) And I can vouch that things went off quite well, in 1984. From Opening Ceremonies and the 84 grand pianos and right on down to […]

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