by Ray Olsen

Part 1 is here.

Part 2
Preliminary games of both the Women's and Men's Beach Volleyball were on the very first day of Olympic events. A great way to start. Although it is a luck of the draw as to who you see in the prelims, the day included the eventual undefeated Women's gold medal team from the USA, Misty May (a Long Beach State grad) and Kerry Walsh. (No, the US men's team didn't medal but the other US women's team got the Bronze.) The players skills and the timeout Beach Volleyball bikini clad dancers were a sight to behold.

The afternoon of the second day was something I had rally been looking forward to. The Athens Olympic Committee had placed the Archery venue in the infield of the original marble Olympic stadium built for the first of the modern Olympic Games in 1896. That stadium, in turn, had been built on the site of the Athenian Panhellenic Games that had taken placed during the later period of the ancient Games in Olympia. The marble steps and seats seemed to echo the athletes and spectators watching the games so many years ago. It had special meaning that day, as in the morning I had attended my first quadrennial meeting of the International Society of Olympic Historians and had met fellow members from all over the world.

Even more memorable was the evening on the middle Sunday of the Games when I joined thousands of Greeks and other spectators filing into the 1896 Olympic Stadium to witness the finish of the Women's Marathon. It was run on roughly the same course as when the ancient Athenian Phidippides ran to report victory in the battle of Marathon over the Persians. It was also the site of the first ever Marathon run as an athletic event finishing in the same stadium in
1896. A huge surprise was the last minutes third place victory in 100 degree heat by an American, Deena Kaster, for the first US Olympic medal in the event since 1984 in Los Angeles. Equally unpredictable was the US silver medal Men's win a week later on the last night of the Games in the same stadium by Mcbrahtom Keflezighi, a graduate of UCLA.

I always try to see any new Olympic sport, and was able to be at the first Trampoline event. It was amazing how high they could get at the beginning of each routine and the number and difficulty of twists and turns they could
execute between the bounces.

For pure endurance, you can't beat a sport included in the Olympics for only
the second time - Triathlon. In Sydney, we saw it by the famous Opera House as the first event of the 2000 Games. In 2004, it was at a venue that was the farthest from the apartment (Over two hours by foot, metro, Olympic bus, light rail and public bus.), but it was worth it. The stadium was set up so you could see the swim, the transitions to bike and run, intermediate laps, and the finish line. An Australian was ahead the entire race, but an Austrian passed her with a kick in the last 100 meters. An American, Susan Williams, was another surprise for the bronze.