Time for some Friday remix...
• NOW WHAT? I've been doing some interviews recently with Tokyo 2020 Team USA Paralympians and Olympians. Some won medals, some had the worst performances of their lives because of unexpected circumstances.
Yes, bookworms, the best of times, worst of times stuff.
One theme emerging is the post-Games letdown, which is always there, feels more acute this time. Athletes plan their entire lives around reaching the Olympics or Paralympics. Every part of their life, from food to training to education to relationships to family planning, gets pegged to the trials/Games schedule. The wrinkle of Tokyo 2020, which ahem - was in 2021, is COVID.
If you wanted to be part of Team USA, you had to hang on through one more year of training, qualifying and messed up competing cycles. That shift upended everything, and then toss in the training facilities closing for some time due to COVID restrictions, caused some serious stress. Of course, high achievers cannot live in the stress cycle when they are trying to achieve something big.
Now the Games are over, and they're back home, re-entering the real world...and boom. Emotions. The subconscious and the soul are finally releasing the box of scary stuff that was contained for the past 18 months. It can take form of sleep issues, malaise, feeling depressed, anxious, and seriously questioning what comes next.
The days and weeks after Tokyo were hard, probably more than we even know, and it sounds like they are just getting out of the slog. Something to ponder when we assign all this sheen and glory for reaching the Games. There are other sides to the adventure of a lifetime.
• BIG PROGRAMMING NOTE! Join me this Sunday for a FB live here, 5 pm Eastern, as BTS knowledge queen/USA Today audience editor Fatima Farha are going to interactively chat about our favorite world dominators of the moment. And we want ARMY to join in! This is going to be a huge couple of weeks in the U.S., with Grammy nominations, 4 sold out concerts in LA, and two appearances - Jingle Ball and American Music Awards. And of course, BTS being BTS, we have no idea what other forms of happy mayhem they will be spring upon us.
I will be LA on Dec. 1 at Sofi Stadium, for my very first in-person BTS concert experience, and I am daebak geeked. More exciting news to come from that as we get closer...
• GOOD STUFF: Happy to share a piece I did for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic website, teamusa.org, for Veteran's Day. There are a ton of active-duty and retired vets on Team USA, and one in particular, has an amazing story.
You cannot talk to Freddie De Los Santos, a bronze medal-winning hand-cyclist in the Tokyo Games, and come away without a huge smile. He is positive, strong, and so full of energy. He's also retired U.S. Army, having served (and seriously injured) in Afghanistan. So thank you for your service and sacrifice Freddie.
• FIONA THE STRIKER! Fiona the hippo, the loveliest creature of all living at the Cincinnati Zoo, knows her stuff. Down to having her own soccer kit. Good on ya Fiona. (h/t to Open Court friend of the Court Karl Kaebnick.)
And that's the remix!
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See you Tuesday!
