David Hearn’s Olympic Journal

The rest of the Games

Monday morning July 29 we packed up and headed into Atlanta to check out the rest of the Olympics. Our friend Tim Kelly and his family invited us to stay in his home and even gave us some awesome track and field tickets! We watched three athletics sessions featuring the two day grueling Decathlon events which crowns the world’s greatest athlete, proven to be Dan O’Brien. We zoomed over to the AT&T Global Village to watch Michael Johnson shatter the 200 meters in an incredible world record performance. This athlete and family meeting place is a hangout which has drinks, snacks, and most importantly televisions sets with all of the Olympic event live feed coverage. You can watch 6 sets at once; if wrestling is not your thing, then you watch the decathlon pole vault, or tennis, or women’s soccer. I watched the first Team USA goal against China highlighted by the women’s “belly slide pig pile”...a very exciting “football” match with some incredible playing. Eat your heart out, Emmitt Smith!

Riding the packed MARTA trains and braving the sweaty crowds in downtown Atlanta around the Centennial Olympic Park is quite an adventure. We had a Hearn family search session without much success in finding our “Hearn Whitewater 1996” brick in the Centennial Olympic Park. Cathy enjoyed a refreshing splash in the Olympic fountain with a ton of other people.

I was in the middle of the hubbub while doing some late night interval eating at Planet Hollywood when Michael Johnson and Dan O’Brien came in with family, friends, and TV cameras in tow. I managed to catch a glimpse of Michael Johnson jumping onto the elevator up to the second floor. Surprisingly, my name was not on the guest list! Dan O’Brien’s family members were easy to spot dressed in their “World’s Greatest Athlete / Dan O’Brien’s Dad” (Mom, Nephew, Uncle, Brother-in-law, and so on...) T-shirts.

I was invited to visit on-the-air with ESPN radio’s “Fabulous Sports Babe” on Friday. Jennifer and I made record time with an extremely crowded MARTA, raced through the masses and arrived in the nick of time at the incredible Nike Pavilion. The “Babe” had interviewed Dan O’Brien earlier, and now her guests included Christine Brennan, sportswriter for the Washington Post, and myself. I had a fun interview talking about my Olympic experience, and of course my desire and intent to continue to compete. We couldn’t leave without first checking out the awesome displays of the Nike athletes and their featured sports. I couldn’t help but think that a whitewater boating display would have fit in perfectly here.

Cathy Hearn, Scott Shipley, Dana Chladek, and I shared a wonderful dinner with our team sponsor, the Champion International Cooperation and their guests and employees at their “Champion Olympic Village” last night. We were hoping to go into the Centennial Olympic Park to check things out, but heard on the radio that all traffic was being diverted and people where being evacuated from the park. They are taking no chances after the horrible explosion.

With two days left to go, this Olympic whirlwind tour is incredible, but a bit exhausting. Saturday I enjoyed the morning catching up on reading the paper and watching the Olympics on television. I am looking forward to watching the track and field relays tonight. I have watched boxing, volleyball, sprint canoe and kayak racing, rhythmic gymnastics, and tennis. The one thing about Olympic boxing, the rules may be complicated, you may not get credit for each and every punch, but when you knock the other guy down, you know who won.

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Last updated: January 18, 2006