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A cynic discovers it's very, very cool to run with the Olympic torch By
Ted Pease On Friday night, about 15,000 people crammed into the Grove Center plaza in downtown Boise to celebrate the arrival of the Olympic Torch, about 9,780 miles into its run across America toward the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City. I was there. I ran the Torch. I didn't trip, I didn't drop it. There was no international incident. As the newspaper says, it was a night that will be impossible to forget. I have to say that I felt a little like a fraud. I was one of about 60 torchbearers who passed the Olympic flame along an 11-mile route into the center of Boise. Next to me on the little bus carrying 16 of us to our posts along our part of the route was a guy about my age who had contracted rheumatoid arthritis in his 30s. "Instead of spending the rest of my life on the couch, I started running marathons," he said. In front of me was a man who 15 years ago donated one of his kidneys to save his diabetic brother's life. Up front was a woman named Jennifer who had been paralyzed in a car wreck and had had to learn to walk and talk and swallow again. Behind her was a woman from Salt Lake who was running for her dad, a longtime Olympic worker who recently died. Me? I was nominated by some of my students at Utah State. I don't know who, so there are no grades in it for them. It feels very good, though a little backward: Any teacher will tell you that the reason we do what we do is our students -- they're the ones who do the inspiring. Many of us who live in Utah are weary and cynical about the 2002 Olympic Games. Born of scandal, bribery and insider trading, the Winter Games that start Feb. 8 in Salt Lake City have been more than a little bit tarnished. As a journalist, skepticism and even cynicism comes with the territory, so I have to admit to feeling a little funny when I was notified that I had been selected to be a torchbearer. But when it came time to put on my official Olympic torch relay running suit, and when I met the other torchbearers in my group, and when we saw the crowds of Boiseans lining our part of the route at 7:30 Friday night, well, it turned into something completely different. They were cheering, for pete's sake. One of my fellow torchbearers, a 65-year-old woman who works with battered women, looked out the van window as we followed a caravan of 20-plus support vehicles: "Look at them," she said. "It's like we're movie stars." The torchbearers (myself excluded) really are stars. The organizers tell us we are "ordinary heroes" who have made a difference in people's lives. Hearing some of the stories of my fellow runners, I believe it. In all, 11,520 ordinary heroes will have passed the Olympic flame along more than 13,500 miles by the time it reaches downtown Salt Lake; one of our handlers pointed out that although 11,520 is a lot of people, it is only something like 0.0004 percent of the U.S. population. I took his word for it. For journalists, it is the height of uncool to cheer, to applaud, to be moved. We are supposed to be detached and "objective." The conversation on an online journalism ethics listserv got right prickly a couple of weeks ago over the question of whether the Salt Lake Tribune was correct in making sports writer Dick Rosetta choose between either running the torch or covering the Games. He couldn't do both (he picked the torch). I don't see that Dick Rosetta was likely to lose his journalistic objectivity if he ran the torch, and said so. Journalists are part of communities, too, after all; as one of our colleagues said online, being a journalist doesn't mean we also have to be what he called "civic eunuchs." I agree with that. On Friday night, even though I don't live in Boise, I was part of that community, and a much larger one. And I know it is uncool to say so, but the experience was amazingly cool. I stepped off the van at my spot on Fort Street and 11th in a residential section of Boise. The people were screaming, there were lights in my face. Flags and candles and flashbulbs and music. The handlers handed me a torch and turned on the propane canister inside. In moments, Tom Fleck, a Boise doctor who had helped a bunch of at-risk kids straighten out their lives, trotted up in the glare of lights from the video truck to pass the Olympic flame from his torch to mine. We held the torches about eight inches apart, and the flame that had been lit in Greece and had been carried by thousands of people over 52 days from Atlanta to Maine to New York City to Texas to Alaska and now to Boise, leapt from Tom to me. And I ran. People I couldn't see and didn't know along both sides of the street were cheering. My support runner, a teacher named Dana, and I were just laughing and running and trying not to trip. Dana had been nominated by one of her seventh-grade math students, a crazy kid who whooped and ran alongside us. My wife (who, unlike me, really is a runner) nearly killed herself trying to run through the spectators and shoot photos at the same time. Two little boys with American flags ran on the other side. We waved to the people on the sidewalk like we were in the Rose Bowl parade. And then, an incredibly short 0.2 miles down 13th Street, it was over. I passed the Olympic flame to a guy named Jim, 60-something with a cane, and the Boise police motorcycles and the caravan of buses were gone. Strangers mobbed me, asked to touch my torch, wanted to take pictures with me. The finale was in the center of Boise, a plaza behind the Grove Hotel where thousands of people crowded a stage. The Torch Relay organizers said it was the biggest crowd they'd had along the cross-country route. My wife, friends and I made our way to the back of the stage, and found Krista Rowles, a USU JCOM senior who has directed all the press coverage of the torch relay since it left Atlanta. (Now there's a story.) Friday's last runner in Boise was a woman named Judy Andrews, whose husband, Master Sgt. Evander Andrews, was the first U.S. soldier to die in Afghanistan. Mrs. Andrews and a phalanx of support runners pushed slowly through the crowd at the Grove and onto the stage, where she lighted the Olympic cauldron. Her mom and four kids joined her on stage, and when the 2-year-old took the mike and sang Jesus Loves Me even the camera crew teared up. The guy in a tuxedo and fancy overcoat who'd been standing next to me noticed my torchbearer suit. "Congratulations," he said, and shook my hand. "Thank you, sir." Later, our friend Maryl Sedivy told me that had been Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne. As we walked back to our parking lot, cars streaming by honked when the drivers saw my running suit and my torch. It was an amazing night that will be very hard to forget. The torch left Boise Saturday morning, moved into Wyoming, goes through western Colorado and arrives in Utah this week. On Feb. 6, the torch stops in Logan for a party at the Spectrum on the USU campus, and then concludes its trek when the flame opens the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City two days later. What a journey! I'm still a cynic, but I have some advice: If you can get to see the torch go by and share in that amazing feeling of community, don't miss it. It is very, very cool.
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