| | Petty caption-writing has kept The Mag's Anne Marie Cruz from the Stadium, but not from her opinions.
I'm getting a taste of what the withdrawal will be like (No. Fun. At. All.) once Olympic Park shuts down to become backyard to a suburb. See, I'm filing stuff for the actual print Magazine, so you're more likely to find me hunkered down at my "desk" (so small, it's snack-size -- only good for collecting my endless bottles of water, Diet Coke and random, half-eaten sweets) than soaking up any events. (So now I'm a sitting target for those pinpricks Sue's been scarred by.) Which is fine, ultimately, because our office in the Main Press Center has one of those all-Olympics TVs.
Overheard
| "AWWWWWHHH."
| —American journalists throughout the Main Press Center, collectively groaning as Lithuanian Sarunas Jasikevicius missed the three-pointer that would've sunk Dream Team III.
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So I watched Marion's attempts to reel in a third gold in her worst event (the long jump), while the rest of the press sat in the stands. Tricky thing is, events are aired continuously (you expect commercial breaks) without someone babbling over the action, so you constantly have to look up from whatever it is you're doing anyway.
On Marion's final attempt (she'd already blown three of the previous five), the live camera angle made it look like she had gotten enough pop off the board to fly past Fiona and Heike by several inches. I gasped and bounded up to the screen to await the call.
As the red flag went up and the replay showed her Niked foot well over the legal zone, I froze. I'd been expecting the ceiling to crash around my head whether she made it (from the skies opening up and Zeus himself summoning her to Olympus) or muffed it (from the skies opening up and Zeus himself bringing the world to its fiery end). For some reason, I could feel my heart trying to jump through my sternum. The TV feed, in the meantime, had moved onto the next competitor, completely bypassing the significance of the last sequence of events.
I hadn't felt strongly about Marion one way or another, but the lack of fanfare, broadcasting bluster or even just another human voice responding to the letdown --anything, really -- felt, well, lonely. It wasn't about saving a nation or saving her husband or saving face. It was about her setting the bar so high, and the odd sense that this bronze would somehow make her ordinary.
Anne Marie Cruz covers the Olympics for ESPN The Magazine.
To send Anne Marie a question or comment in Sydney, click here.
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