I remember as a young boy watching two runners standing on the podium and as the american athem was being played they were laughing and joking about something,they later had their medals taken off them for their lack of respect, Iwonder would they have their medals taken away if it happened in this olympics?
I remember an unprepared African swimmer who had never swam in a 50 meter pool before and struggled to finish the race he was in, at one point it looked like he might have to be rescued.
My favorite memory from past olympics has got to be watching the USSR gymnast Maria Tereshaba perform an amazing routine on the isometric bars and just as she dismount the cables holding up the bars snapped and the bars fell flat on the ground at the same time as the gymnast landed perfectly on her feet .She just walked away as if nothing had happened.
In the 60’s or 70’s, at least one black American athlete was stripped of his medal when he gave the black power sign while on the podium. That’s in the book of lists.
I remember the guy from Africa who barely knew how to swim who won the medal because of all the false starts. I’ve always wondered if the other athletes purposely false started.
The Lillehammer winder olympics were particularly bloody for figure skaters. That was when figure skaing went more physical rather than artistic and people were stretching their limits. A french woman figure skating had such bad stagefright and fell so many times even while she was skating in a straight line that after her routine was over television cut to a commercial and never posted her scores.
I actually got a chance to go to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta as I was living in the area at the time. Some memories from that, missing the train for one of the events we had tickets for (don’t remember which one I was only 7 at the time.) A Japanese man handing me a Japanese flag at the Judo event and sitting in front of two French men and listening to them say bad things about Americans (in English) during the same event. My brother loosing his favorite childhood toy in the mass of people. Since then I have watched the Olympics less and less each year, I don’t think I even watched any of the 04 games.
The first thing that came to mind for me seeing the title of this thread was the 4x100 freestyle relay yesterday. I have NEVER seen anything like Lezak’s final leg. Final 10 meters for that matter.
Ben Johnson’s 9.79 in the 100 in 1988, best run I’ve ever seen, steroids or no.
Kerri Strug’s vault.
Rulon Gardner, the Greco-Roman wrestler and high-school teacher, who won in 2004 over a Russian who hadn’t lost in many years.
Watching Joan Benoit cross the finish line in the first-ever Olympic women’s marathon. I was a runner at the time (10K), and Joan Benoit was my hero.
Kerri Strug, definitely. That girl absolutely defines heart.
I think it may have been Lillehammer…the first Olympics after the Soviet Union dissolved. Despite the good that would come from that, I remember being so sad for the athletes, standing on the podium and seeing the Olympic flag go up and hearing the Olympic hymn being played instead of the flag and the anthem they’d dreamed of representing all those years…or perhaps a new flag their fathers had fought for. They all seemed a little bereft.
Torvill and Dean’s “Bolero.” Wow!
And yes…the year the American hockey team beat the Soviet Union for the gold.
