The A to Z Olympics: 26 Torch-Worthy Tales & Tidbits

By Maria Kaj

With an extra year of pent-up Olympics fever behind us, and the Tokyo Games reaching final preparation stages, it's time to wake up our Citius, Altius, Fortius brains! This book features tales and tidbits from the international sporting event where every competitor and team has a story. Quirky, triumphant, famous, or under the radar, there is nothing like the Olympics for unique anecdotes and human drama.

 

The A to Z Olympics covers the Games through 26 short, breezy essays. From Archery to Zagunis. From ancient Olympia to the newest X-Games sports.  From household names to those you've never heard of—but should have. It also addresses curious questions: Why are Fijians so good at rugby? Who started on the track but ended up in roller derby? And what exactly does DNF mean?

 

Includes stories about:
•    Greg Louganis
•    Kerri Strug
•    Claressa Shields
•    Florence Griffith Joyner
•    Babe Didrikson
•    …and many more…

 

Easy to skim, and packed with content, this book was written by an Olympics nerd for other Olympics nerds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Maria Kaj
• Release date: Apr 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393881957

Book preview

The A to Z Olympics:

26 Torch-Worthy Tales and Tidbits

by Maria Kaj

Your respect for the author’s copyright is deeply appreciated.

Text copyright © by Maria Kaj 2021

Cover design by Karin Kallmaker and Maria Kaj.

First Edition.

All rights reserved. This work is sold subject to the condition that it shall not in any way be circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any alternate, copied or replicated form of digital, binding or cover. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book by any means without permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy.

Information contained is based on publicly available sources and is neither authorized nor endorsed by the United States Olympic Committee (USOC/Team USA) or its athletes.

Although the author and publisher have attempted to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the information contained, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or any inconsistency herein. Information provided is as is.

Cover photo of Sybil Queenie Newall from the Fourth Olympiad 1908 London Official Report published by the British Olympic Association in 1909.

Cover photo of fencer Mariel Zagunis by © Marie-Lan Nguyen /

Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY 3.0.

For more information:

Visit my blog/store at kajmeister.com

Or contact

[e-mail].

For those who shiver with delight

when Greece begins marching into the Olympic stadium

Introduction

Every four years, when the snow starts to melt, you can hear the sneakers squeak and see the rosin fly as athletes kick their training for the Summer Olympics into high gear. They start months in advance, practicing, scrimmaging, and qualifying to arrive at the Games at the peak of their capabilities. These would-be competitors spend months in preparation because those who have Olympic dreams must hit their stride precisely. Baseball and basketball players can wait until next year; Olympic athletes must withstand four years of training and waiting.

In addition, unlike baseball or basketball players, these competitors rarely do it for the money. They endure years of hardship, financial and physical, because they love their sport and want the chance to show that passion to us. Fans recognize and reward that elite level of engagement, even when we don’t follow the sport. If someone tells you they compete in judo or archery, you might smile and respond with an example of one of your quaint hobbies, perhaps scrapbooking or geocaching. However, if they tell you they’ve qualified for the Olympic team in judo or archery, you sit up a little straighter, ask about their chances, and propose a selfie with your new friend, the Olympic athlete.

Warming Up to Watch the Olympics

This is the mystique of the Games. We know athletes who compete at the Olympics are something special, even if we have paid no attention for the past four years. Like the athletes, fans also prepare for the Games, the serious ones sometimes starting months in advance.

In the old days, we might buy a pre-Games magazine or pull out homemade videotapes from previous competitions. Now, we can also surf YouTube for snippets of contests we remember or listen to podcasts. These preparations have a ritual to them just like training for a competition. We revisit stories about the best and the brightest of the past, and we investigate records of the up-and-coming. Who are the ones to watch? Who will be the next Mary Lou Retton, Michael Phelps, or Jesse Owens? Where does Team USA fit in the pecking order? When will my favorite event be on? How many days until the Games begin?

Time to Prepare

If this is an Olympic year—and there’s a 50% chance that it might be—then it’s time to start gearing up. For 2021, we got an extra year after COVID-19 threw a wrench in the timing. But there have been changes before: wars, boycotts, political scandals, shifts in the timing. There will be critics of whether the Games should be held at all. Those critics go back to 1896 and have been barking and whining every Olympic cycle since. The Games will go on.

For Tokyo, athletes who had been peaking in the spring of 2020 were halted in their tracks. They will regroup to regain their momentum. For Beijing 2022, there may be ongoing crowd limitations and vaccination certificates. Climate change may limit available snow and doping scandals may impact who shows up. Yet these are only logistics to work around, by competitors used to making do with inadequate resources.

We fans must also get back in the saddle and be ready to watch. Waiting a year simply heightened our interest. We may have to work a little harder, read a little more, and learn some new facts to prepare. That’s where The A to Z Olympics comes in.

Why Write an Alphabetic Olympics Book?

I am a lifelong Olympics junkie, a fan beyond fans, never far from the desire to discuss whether the feats of Jackie Joyner-Kersee or Michael Phelps should be considered more impressive. Out of this fervor, I wrote a book about the Americans from Rio 2016, focusing on those Olympic athletes who receive little media notice because their sports are lesser-known ones like wrestling, judo, and fencing.

In 2020, as I faced the first COVID-19 lockdown in March, I found myself looking for a distraction. You all have your own stories; you all remember where you were when the lockdown first got serious in your town. Among other vocations, I am a blogger, a member of a supportive and playful writing community. We like to challenge each other with topics for discussion.

My homies in cyberspace came through. The blogging community proposed an A to Z challenge: Write 26 alphabetic posts on any topic. The challenge has been around for twelve years, but it was new to me. Four hundred people had already signed up at 7:00 a.m. on April 1, 2020, to write about letter A when it crossed my path. Like a beacon in a storm, I grabbed this distraction with both hands.

Even though I’d already written about the Games, the Olympics is a gift that keeps on giving, which is one thing this book will prove. The idea of A is for Archery flashed into my brain. Instantly, I remembered Justin Huish shooting arrows through his hallway, and I was off to the races.

What’s in The A to Z Olympics?

If you have ever tried creating an alphabetical list of anything, you know where the trouble spots lie. You’ve probably played Scrabble at least once. Q, X, and Z. Once I assigned topics to those letters, the others provided plenty of options.

However, I created a few sub-rules for myself, just to keep it interesting for me, which will keep it more interesting for you. I wanted to revisit some of Team USA’s famous events, like Kerri Strug’s vault for gold and Bob Beamon’s leap into history. But I also wanted to dig further into the little-known but fascinating. As a result, there is plenty here that will feel less familiar to many, topics like the science of the javelin or the history of the shuttlecock.

The curious combination between country and sport is another recurring theme. Several chapters cover the fans who go crazy for rugby in Fiji, water polo in Serbia, and badminton in Indonesia. Some of those combinations—such as the country that loves judo more than Japan—will surprise you.

I also wanted to look backward and forward. Thus, on the one hand, there are journeys into Olympic history, like how the site of Olympia came to be the home of the ancient Games and why a French aristocrat landed front and center in the effort to restore the modern Olympics. On the other hand, I wanted to explore the new sports and the younger athletes emerging out of our X Games culture.

All in all, this book of alphabetic entries can be thought of as a buffet of Olympic topics. Some are stories of athletes, some are about sports, and some cover artists who themselves create stories of sport. This is one post-pandemic buffet you can sample without concern.

You can read the book in sequence A to Z, or you can sample it like an appetizer plate. You can start wherever you like and flip through it. Most of the chapters are meant for nibbling.

Best of all, The A to Z Olympics can be sampled again after Tokyo 2021, before Paris 2024, or during Los Angeles 2028. The smorgasbord of sports is timeless.

Enjoy the buffet!

A is for Archery

As a practice that dates back to the ancient days of ziggurats and slingshots, archery would naturally be selected as one of the first sports included in the modern Olympics. Yet, after appearing for only four Games, archery disappeared from the list of events for nearly fifty years, until a pioneering woman brought it back. While American Olympic success has belonged to athletes like the chill dude from Southern California and The Prospector from Arizona, the recent international masters of Olympic archery have hailed from Asia, channeling what their warrior ancestors perfected. Even so, the sure-shooting South Koreans probably practice outdoors, rather than in the house. Certainly not through the house.

Thanks to a Danish Woman

Archery was introduced into the Olympics in 1900 with simple static targets, a la Robin Hood. However, by 1920, the contests had proliferated into a variety of events which ranged from shooting at a static target to a stuffed bird atop a pole. Nearly all the competitors clustered in each event of those first few contests were from Great Britain, France, or Belgium, making archery international in name only.

Bows were much simpler than the counterweighted technological weaponry of today that includes sights and stabilizers. Back then, the plain bows contrasted with the much fancier names of events, such as the York or Continental style or the Au Cordon Dore and the Sur la Perch a la Pyramide. With those names, it’s no wonder that the French and Belgians captured most of the early medals.

But even fancy names couldn’t sustain public interest. Either due to the lack of an audience or from having too many events and not enough participation, archery was phased out after 1920 in favor of increased track and field, and team sports. However, a stalwart set of participants continued to hone their craft outside the Games, launching an international archery organization in 1931. Ultimately, it was a Danish captain who successfully lobbied for the Olympic re-introduction in the 1970s.

This captain, Inger Frith, gained notoriety as the highest-ranking woman in the Danish army in World War II. She was a meteorologist stationed first in South Africa and then in Cairo, providing critical weather information for Middle East operations. That military no-nonsense background, coupled with her love of archery and knowledge of wind speeds, made her a natural to become the first woman president of the World Archery Federation. Captain Frith, or Mrs. Frith as the historical documents label her, was not only the first female president of archery but the first female president of any international sports federation.

The World Archery Organization, the governing body of the sport, was founded in the city of Lwow, Poland, a place later re-designated as Lviv, Ukraine when postwar borders shifted. The association’s original name, Fédération Internationale de Tir à l’arc (FIT), migrated when the headquarters moved to Maison du Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland.

To sum it up: a sport invented in cultures from Mesopotamia to the Far East is run by an organization with a French name whose leader was a Danish captain. The federation started in a Polish city (later Soviet, much later Ukrainian), but then moved to Switzerland. You can’t get much more international than that.

Frith guided the FIT from 1961-1977, and her crowning achievement was persuading her friend, Avery Brundage, and his International Olympic Committee (IOC) to bring archery back to the Games. When archery did finally return in 1972, only individual men’s and women’s archery contests were held. American men and women took the gold medals, but archers from Finland, Sweden, Poland, and the Soviet Union also stood on the podium.

Between 1984 and 1996, rule changes were constant from one Olympics to the next, perhaps more than in any other sport.¹ There were changes in the number of rounds, the order of the distances, and the rules for advancement through the brackets. In 1988, a team event was also added for both genders, and one thing did become constant from that point forward: The 1988 Seoul Olympics heralded the rise of the current archery superpower—South Korea.

Dongyi: People Who Make and Shoot Arrows Well

South Korea won its first archery medals in 1984, a gold and bronze for individual women. Since then, South Koreans have won 39 of the 120 medals awarded, 23 of those gold. It’s a remarkable record for any country to achieve in so short a time.

Theories abound as to why the South Koreans became such a dominant power in archery. Certainly, they didn’t suddenly discover the bow in 1984. As far back as the fifth century, South Korea was a country with such fearsome warriors shooting from horseback that their Chinese neighbors called them dongyi, the people who make and shoot arrows well. You might think that would make the expert shots in Mongolia and Wales dominant in Olympic archery, too, although that isn’t the case. Still, wouldn’t it be fun to see an Olympian Equestrian/Archery combo, like the 70 m Target from Horseback?

The traditional Korean bow, called a gakgung, has a shooting range of up to 145 m, far longer than the maximum 90 m Olympic distance. The gakgung is a recurve bow, meaning the tips curve away from the archer, which delivers more power and distance. A centuries-old recurve bow is typically made of bamboo backed with sinew. With water buffalo horn strengthening its belly, the polished wood of such a museum piece combines ornate design and lethality.

Some Koreans, however, say it’s not the bow’s design or their warrior history that makes them good at the sport—it’s that archery continues to be taught to children. Others say South Korea is good at archery because it’s their regional sport, although that reasoning seems somewhat circular. Plus, sport historians often point out that archery rose in favor when South Korean athletes started winning medals, not the other way around.

There’s also the notion that South Korea, knowing that they would be hosting the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, deliberately looked for sports they might win and chose archery to concentrate their resources. They also stumbled upon a few extraordinarily talented athletes, such as Kim Soo-nyung who won six medals in Women’s Individual and Team Archery over four Olympics. Add some outstanding coaches and, like water polo in Yugoslavia, diving in China, and beach volleyball in the United States, the national infrastructure made South Korea the team to beat.

By 2016, South Korea had even won individual gold on the women’s side in eight consecutive Olympics, one of the longest-running active streaks across any sport. If they win in the next Games, that ninth win could tie the record. However, Team USA has had its own distinguished history and ranks as the country with the second-most medals. The recent American renaissance began with a Men’s Team Archery gold in Atlanta, led by a youngster from Southern California.

Shoot Through the House

American Justin Huish was a 20-something Gen-Xer, a skateboarder-turned-archer back in 1996 when he came to Atlanta sporting a goatee and wraparound sunglasses. Although Huish’s parents sold archery equipment, he had only been practicing the sport for a few years. Thus, he was that Olympic phenomenon known as the nerveless rookie. He had no reputation to protect, and conventional wisdom said he wasn’t old enough to be nervous.

Ranked only 24th in the world when he started the competition, he shot well enough to work his way into the finals, and ultimately beat Sweden’s Magnus Petterson for a gold. Leading Team USA to a gold as well made him a fan favorite.

Prior to the summer of 1996, Huish wasn’t well known internationally, although American news media had featured him in interviews. His international ranking of 24 wasn’t the reason; it was the way he practiced. He needed daily workouts, but driving to the nearest range required him to endure terrible Simi Valley traffic, so he turned his house into a shooting range. He stationed the target in his backyard and opened all the doors¬—back, kitchen, and front—so that he could stand in the street and shoot all the way down the hallway.

Mom always said, Don’t shoot arrows in the house! She never said anything about shooting them through the house.

The Prospector

Huish didn’t return to the Games after 1996, and Team USA fell out of medal contention as South Koreans continued to thrive. However, a recent American comeback started in the late 2000s, this time led by Arizona’s Brady Ellison. Ellison helped win two team silvers and an individual bronze in 2012 and 2016. He has been nicknamed both the Arizona Cowboy and The Prospector because he seemed to excel at finding gold (the color of the target center), which seems so appropriate for the Olympic competitions. Ellison has also held the longest number-one ranking for a men’s recurve archer, from 2011-2013, and continued to do well as Tokyo approached.

But the postponement threw all the archers off their time plan. While the buildup to qualifying happened prior to most of the spring lockdowns of 2020, the rankings became frozen right as some key competitions were about to begin. Going into the late summer, the men’s rankings for recurve were Brady Ellison, Lee Woo