Like everyone I’ve had fun watching the Olympics so far in its first few days.
A little less than a week into them starting, I have tried my best to keep up with the big news either for USA athletes or teams along with great stories from foreign athletes who have won.
With it set in the time when it is the slowest time in sports for me every year, it is a welcome relief to be able to put on some sort of sport every night like I am used to doing for most of the year.
It’s too early for me to recall my favorite moments of these games so I will instead share some of my favorite memories from watching the Olympics.
1996 Atlanta
I was not a sports fan yet when I was six years old, but these games made a big mark on me as a kid thanks to my sister Carla.
She did gymnastics up until her early teens which meant she was consumed by the “Magnificent Seven” girls gymnastics team, the first U.S. team to win the team finals.
Before TiVo or being able to find streams online, the only way to save something from television was to record it with a blank VHS tape. My family made big use of these, recording mostly TV movies and various things to watch later.
My sister recorded the Olympic gymnastic performances from these games and must have watched them literally a thousand times growing up. Through osmosis, it means I picked up the big beats of what happened at these games before I ever appreciated it.
Kerri Strug’s gold medal clinching vault is still one of the sports most famous moments 25 years later.
All I knew was I thought Dominique Moceanu was one of the few girls at the time I could admit to myself was cute since girls were icky to me.
2004 Athens
I just missed out caring enough to watch the 2000 Olympics with the sports bug infecting me a year later in 2001 so I do not have any memories from that one.
The 2004 Olympics was my first time watching and I found several sports I still have fun watching every four or five years.
Watching the sprint track and field races were fun, especially since both my parents were into it since they both did it in high school. Handball is still one of most entertaining foreign sports, so much so it now seems cliché for new people every four years make the same conclusion.
So much gymnastics watching as a kid still gets me invested in watching it in the Olympics since I now know how hardcore it is when contrasted with the image of smiling teenage girls doing gracefully athletic skills and flips.
Swimming is always fun to watch the first week since there always seems to be an American to cheer for in every race.
Weirdly, my most memorable moment was watching beach volleyball, specifically the duo of Misty May-Trainor and Kerri Walsh-Jennings.
I didn’t realize at the time I was watching the best team in beach volleyball history in a sport that was so fun to watch.
They made playing it look so deceptively easy that only after covering high school indoor volleyball I now know is not true.
It became a thing for me to watch them the next two Olympics as they went on to win the gold medals in both of them as well to leave no doubt they were the best ever.
This is the first Olympics I will watch without either one playing and I have found myself less invested without having both or one of them to root for.
I didn’t realize back then I was getting spoiled.
2008 Beijing
This Olympics is one of my favorites since it made so many great stars for me as a high schooler. Still, it was the Micheal Phelps show from start to finish. He earned eight medals in Athens, but only six were gold.
The record was seven and he had another chance to break that record at this one.
It seemed every swim race you saw people were breaking world records left and right. Phelps was living up to the hype and things just seemed to be going his way even when he did not dominate. He won the 100 meter butterfly race by 0.01 seconds.
Still the most famous race of those games was the 4×100 relay. Even watching it now tells you everything you need to know.
France was supposed to win and the U.S team were big underdogs. The France team rubbed it in as its anchor leg and world record holder in the event Alain Bernard said his team was going to smash the Americans.
Going into the final leg the veteran anchor for the U.S. Jason Lezak was behind Bernard and only barely caught him at the wall to win. The celebration from Phelps and his teammates is iconic and showed he would not be denied his record even if he had to get some help along the way.
I remember being at my high school football team retreat at the time when Phelps won his final gold medal with little drama. There was a pool at the retreat and all of us were inspired to have a swimming race relay that we never would have been interested in doing if not for the fever Phelps had on us.

To read the full story, pick up a copy of the mid-week edition of the Bowie News.