Last month, Jill got the opportunity to go to Atlanta, so of course she wanted to check out TKFLASTANI Sarah Dylla’s exhibit at the Atlanta History Center. Collections Manager Erica Hague took Jill behind the scenes to the archives to see some of the thousands of items they have from the Atlanta 1996 Olympics and Paralympics, so we bring you that conversation. Seriously, if you love Izzy, you’d be in heaven in these archives! Here’s some of the items we talked about in the episode:

The exhibit itself is really cool – it touches on a lot of things that made Atlanta 1996 stand out, such as high tech websites and wayfinding programs and information kiosks that make you appreciate how far we’ve come with technology since then. It also examines some of the legacy of these Games and how they affected the city. Definitely worth a visit!

Speaking of history, we have a few more Albertville moments for the year. As promised, Jill has another biathlon moment, specifically the women’s relay. 1992 was the first year that women competed in the biathlon at the Olympics, and this race was surprising in more ways than one! You can watch the relay in its color pukespolsion entirety here.

In news from TKFLASTAN we have updates from:

• Pin collector Don Bigsby
• Table tennis player Milly Tapper
• Beach volleyball player Kelly Cheng

In our Paris 2024 update, registration for the first ticket lottery has started. Join Le Club for better access. Also, more Phrygees will be made in France. You don’t say?

The International Olympic Committee has announced it will hold an e-sports week, complete with competitions. Maybe we can train up for this one!

And the International Paralympic Committee held an Extraordinary General Assembly to vote on whether Russia and Belarus should remain members. SPOILER ALERT: It’s not a good ending for Russia and Belarus.

Shout out to our patron Dan! Check out his Olympics newsletter here. Want to be our patron? Find out more here.

Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!

Photo of Erica Hague courtesy of Erica Hague. Photos from the archives and exhibit: Jill Jaracz.

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This is an uncorrected machine-generated transcript. It contains errors. Please do not quote from the transcript; use the audio file as the record of note. 

Jill: [00:00:00] Hello, fans of TKFLASTAN, and welcome to another episode of Keep the Flame Alive, the podcast for fans of the Olympics in Paralympics. I am your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co-host, Alison Brown. Hall. Hello, how are you?

Alison: I am rested and rejuvenated and I am ready to do things.

Excellent. I don’t know what those things are, but we’ll figure it out. ,

Jill: I had to share with you. I went used book shopping over the Thanksgiving holiday. Oh no. And went to one of those places with, just stacks of books everywhere. I, I got a Contributions of Women in Sports.

Alison: That looks like a very small book for contributions of women’s in sports.

Jill: Well, it was a library book from 1975, but it has, Babe Dickson Sahari Kathy Kushner, an Olympic Equestrian Wilma Rudolph, Billy J. King, Peggy Fleming, and Melissa Belo, who is a backstroker. And then there’s another outstanding women’s section, but I think it’s, made For Kids.

Also got Peggy Fleming, the Long Program.

Alison: Oh, I remember that book.

Jill: Did you read it?

Alison: No.

Jill: Okay. This may show up on your doorstep at some point when I’m done with it. ,

Alison: I remember when she did the book tour and I think she was on Donahue. That’s how old that book is, .

Jill: Oh yeah. How old is this book? Copyright 1999.

Wow. This is gonna be a gem. And then I got the. ABC’s TV Sports Guidebook to Mexico 1968.

Alison: Oh, that’s a fine. Yeah,

Jill: this was, this was a fine. So it, it is pitchers and previews of all of the, the sports kind of thing. So I’m, looking forward to perusing that at some point soon.

Alison: So that’s, that’s a nice cold weather reading you got there. Exactly,

Jill: exactly.

[00:02:23] Erica Hague Interview

Jill: But speaking of old stuff, We are going into the archives. With Atlanta 1996, and it’s a shame we couldn’t travel there when we had our Atlanta year. But in this past month, I had the opportunity to go to Atlanta. So I contacted the Atlanta History Center and they were kind enough to give me a behind the scenes look at the Atlanta 1996 archives.

I talked with Collections Manager, Erica Hague, who showed me a few of the thousand of things they have in storage. The Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games Commission loaned all of their materials to the museum in the late 1990s. And then in 2002, deeded all of that material to the museum.

And as you may remember, these gains were known for being a very commercialized, so it may not come as a surprise that the museum is still processing items from this collect. So Erica showed me a few highlights and also walked me through Atani Sarah Dylla’s exhibit on the Atlanta 1996 games. Take a listen to our conversation.

Erica Hague: The Atlanta Olympics are really interesting, which you probably know because mm-hmm. , they were sort of bridging that gap between technology.

It was the first games that had a website. And then we also have, and I have something really cool to show you. I think it’s really cool. My mom worked in the TV industry and so, it was also one of the first ones that had an actual, satellite plan and like a plan for how all of the trucks were going to work in conjunction to make sure that everything was filmed and like shot live and broadcast and like, also arranging with all of the international news companies.

So I think locally us, NBC bought rights for it for like 4,480 5 million. I think it’s million. Uh, It was a lot of money, but Internationally, there was other trucks that had to come in or other vehicles that had to come in with their satellite information. So we have one of those plans that were donated to us to show like how everything was organized.

And yeah, I, I got some of our schlocky things out. I also am a big fan of Izzy, so this is actually the Izzy prototype doll out here.

And then something that we doesn’t have a lot of Paralympic things, but something that we do have is actually from a Canadian athlete by Walter Wu. He is a swimmer.

Okay. And he actually works for Home Depot and like, oh wow. Atlanta is the headquarters for Home Depot. And so we have this really unique connection there. And we actually have his swim goggles here, and I think his swim cap is actually out on display.

But we have Izzy out. And this is the prototype of Izzy, so he’s not like exactly the Izzy that we all know.

Jill: How early of a prototype is this?

Erica Hague: It’s probably still from like the early nineties [00:05:00] Izzy, and we have a really fun display of this upstairs of how Izzy was sort of sprung from the mind of Billy Payne as a creature, right?

And he, there’s like this cartoon that sort of shares how that progressed.

So we hit Izzy. We still have the rings on his tails, but he doesn’t have his Lightning bolt eyebrows get, and he also has slightly different portions but still pretty familiar as Izzy, right? Yeah. . So we have, we got him. And let me show you, I can bring out one of the ones that was like, actually

Jill: Just Who has Barbie’s? Oh my gosh. A swatch watch. Holy cow.

Erica Hague: Like, well, what didn’t put in the exhibit. The exhibit has probably maybe a hundred items in it. 200. And we have over 5,000

Jill: records. Wow. Of museum

Erica Hague: materials. So the little

Jill: hum mocos cook bottles.

Erica Hague: I all of our Izzy dolls here. So this is the first wet. And it’s signed by Billy Payne. And so he’s got his eyebrows here, right? The zigzag. And he looks pretty similar to the prototype, right? The dimensions are just a little bit different. His legs are a little bit shorter. He’s still got the rings, he’s still got the cool sneakers.

So all of those things still exist, but that’s the difference. But there’s a, a lot of really funny photos of the first prototype of the mascot costume. Oh yeah. Oh, and you have more there too.

So it’s, so it’s through a lot of iterations. All of these are actually licensed ones. So all of these are just slightly different licensed brand ones. When we got the materials for the games, a lot of it is really similar, right? There’s a lot of similar things that are. Remade over and over again.

Mm-hmm. or slightly different. But that’s because they’re selling all of these materials, right? Everything is licensed, everything is available for sale or resale, and that’s why they have so many different variations of things. Okay. So you see like thousands and thousands of pins, buttons, badges, however you wanna call them.

Pin collecting was super, super, a nineties thing. So we, I, I’m gonna show you one of the notebooks that we have of those. But everything was licensed through the U S O C of course. And then cause all the brand stuff had to be approved, but they’re slightly different variations either in size or in like how the Izzy is posed or things like that.

So. Okay. These are all sort of mid-sized s .

And then we also have a really large Izzy up in the gallery which is slightly terrifying to people that don’t know it’s there. But also as a child of the eighties, that was around in the nineties and got to like watch the Olympics and be very excited about it.

Izzy was my first mascot, right. That I remember from the Olympics. And so I have a connection to Izzy and I love that Izzy. So every time I see it in the gallery, I just wanna hug it . But it’s behind glass so you don’t hug it. He, he’s very endearing to me and other people don’t like him, but I think he’s cool character.

Jill: But, but that’s, that’s the thing though, when you’re a kid, if that’s like, I’m a Sam the Eagle girl, same reason. And we have our book club leader oh, loves Izzy to death. But that’s a sweet spot when you get the right mask up for the right age.

Erica Hague: Yeah. for the exhibit it was very interesting because we wanted to make sure that for a lot of.

Kids, especially mascots, are something that they can identify with. Mm-hmm. and they can like, connect with. And so, uh, we wanted to make sure that we held onto that whimsy . And so we actually put several different mascots into the timeline. So leading up into where you go into the exhibit, you get to experience the different mascots over time, not all of them.

Mm-hmm. , but we did select a few that were our favorites. So we have like

Amic The Beaver from Montreal. he’s there. And then we’ve, we’ve got some of the ones from the games after the Atlantic Games of course.

So, uh, you get ones from like the London Games, which are also made sort of creatures. Yes. So all of that’s a lot, lot of fun. And it was fun learning more about the different mascots.

But Izzy is one of my fas for sure. So a lot of the materials over here near the Izzy are things that were given by different groups or by different nations to the Centennial Olympic Games Commission.

And then we also have like Izzy Pain Brick, right? The bricks are something that was a huge fundraising effort for the games. And if you go down to Olympic Centennial Park today, even you can see all of the bricks. So it’s, it’s weird to catalog bricks sometimes, right? And be like, this is an artifact, but it is

It is an artifact, and it is something that was a huge part of the games. So when you’re looking through some of their, their papers and their documentations all of the, the bricks are a big part of how they fundraised for the games. So,

Jill: And sports equipment.

Erica Hague: Yes. Uhhuh,

Jill: new Beach, volleyball, first games,

Erica Hague: yes.

Uhhuh. So we have like the badminton rackets here. And some of this is items that were used in the games, and then sometimes it’s also branded material that was sold in advance of the games for people to enjoy and like get [00:10:00] excited about it. Right. I think my favorite thing in the collection, and I don’t know if this is actually on exhibit or not, I didn’t check to see is a A car club, a car stick that you’d put into your steering wheel as like a security device.

Jill: Oh yeah.

Erica Hague: That is Olympic branded .

Jill: Oh my gosh.

Erica Hague: And it’s just kind of like, okay. And then also with that technology too you could buy a floppy disc that had multiple different backgrounds for your computer screen on the floppy desk that came with a mousepad .

Jill: Nice. Wow.

Erica Hague: They were really pushing the tech and I am here for it.

Uh, But we have a lot of different

Jill: wait, is it five and a half inch floppy or is it three and

Erica Hague: it’s three and a quarter is, it’s not the big, big floppy, no. Since we’re still like late eighties, early nineties the larger floppy tested to get phased out. So then we’re down to the small size f floppies, but we’re not yet to like full CD ROMs.

Okay. . So not everyone had the CD Rom yet, but but yeah, so all sorts of different materials on this side of the, the shelving. And we can take a look at some of the schlocky things that I pulled out here.

Jill: Yeah.

Erica Hague: Izzy was on a lot of things, right. and a lot of different poses too. So, one of the cups back here, you can see that he had a pose for nearly every event, or nearly every sporting arena. And so there’s a whole set of, I believe, pens that is just him and his different sporting poses.

So this is the baseball. And we have all sorts of other ones. This is actually the running the baton relay race. And then you’ve got the javelin here on the . So, those poses were used in all sorts of materials that you can see, right?

Like coffee mugs, glasses we even got like a little children’s dining set here. Mm-hmm. with like a bold spoon and fork. And then like also on like hair ribbons and things like that. So all sorts of different stuff.

Jill: Is this leftover ribbon from like

Erica Hague: Yeah. So, from the medals, yeah. Mm-hmm. . So, the leaf pattern that’s on it is the quilt of Leaves pattern, which was the design element that was made specifically for the Atlanta Games.

And it’s supposed to be a quilt because like Southern Traditions, quilting were all coming together. Pieces, parts coming together to make a hole. And then the leaves are like a heralding back of the laurel leaves. Okay. That’s sort of the idea behind it. And so, uh, they also gifted quilt makers of Georgia.

Actually this is the book, a quilt catalog book for it. And there was an effort to actually create quilts for all of the winners, I believe, or each country at least. So they were all gifted different quilts that were made from the quilters of Georgia. I think that there were more than just Georgia quilters as part of that group.

Mm-hmm. , but um, they were the ones that organized that. So . Yeah. I can’t imagine sewing all of those quilts, but, and it wasn’t just a single quilt design. It was each quilter could design whatever they wanted and like, it was usually like a quilt of leave sort of pattern. Okay. But it was something that they, they used and, and did so, It’s pretty neat.

Jill: So I have to ask, because the Atlanta games were known as being very commercial. Yes. Does that make an archivist job more difficult? Because there is just so much stuff.

Erica Hague: Yeah, there’s so much slack. mean, you think about all of the passive cultural things that were branded with the Olympics. And like you can see that we have like McDonald’s boxes, like a Big Mac box and like, cups and things like that that were, things that would be thrown away.

But were still branded with the Olympic games and like merchandise like that was also similar.

Jill: so I have to ask about the cups. When does somebody go, oh, we need to save one and pull it out kind of thing,

Erica Hague: or, yeah. So how do we collect what we, how do we collect? That’s a great question. So for these, none of these were like used, right?

Like there are Monopoly game McDonald’s cup here. It’s not full of grease stains, right? We’re not pulling that out of the trash. These were actually ones that were collected by the commission. All of these things were collected by the commission, and it was all because they were maintaining brand, right?

So they were in control of what was being created. And so they kind of had like a, a type collection of all of the materials. So these were new . These were not yet produced or put out to people, but it was them checking off that, the torch logo was right, that it has this cult of Leafs pattern that you can see on the background overall of like the Pontiac and Sea World and Bush Gardens okay, cosponsoring.

But all of these were brand new materials that Were being checked out by the Games Commission in advance of them actually being put out into production and consumption by individuals. Now, some of the things like the Coke cans were actually something that they had been filled at one time, , and they actually had to clean out.

So there’s notes on all of the different materials depending on how they came to us or how they came to the Games Commission because [00:15:00] all of this is the Games Commission.

Jill: Do you ever get tempted to, because I see that they’re, the McDonald’s cups have the pool to play. Do you ever get tempted to pull or no?

You’re

Erica Hague: just like, no. Separate yourself. I don’t know that they’re going to honor my uh, 1996 ticket pool. Uh, I mean, what are they gonna do? Send me back in time because it is a win trip to the 1996 Olympic Games. Sit in front of a vcr. Here you go. No, it’s never super tempting. A lot of the stuff that I find more tempting from a standpoint of like, finding out more about it or, or wanting to like do something is we, we can’t clean all of the stuff, right?

Because some of these things, if they were used, the use is part of the history, right? So if they’re staining or if there’s something like that, like that’s part of the history of that object and that’s part of the story that it has. And so we wanna make sure that that’s actually maintained in some ways, as long as it’s not hazardous to the actual item.

So, we don’t have that with any of. Stuff. But in other collections that is a concern that we have. So, generally uh, for the large part of our, our collections are things that are donated by people from around Atlanta, around the us, around the world sometimes. And they contact us and they say, I have this thing that is related to the history of Atlanta.

Do you want it? And we have a whole committee process. It’s not just me saying yes or no. It goes to a committee that meets once a month. And we assess that and see if it meets our collecting plans. We have a whole plan of what we want to collect, why we want to collect those things, and how it’s going to fit into our long term mission.

Because once it is part of our collection, it’s here for the long haul, right? We see ourselves as stewards of Atlanta’s history and that’s Atlanta. It’s history given to us by the people, for the people, right? uh, We hope that we’re holding these things in trust with them and helping preserve them for the long term, for people to continue to learn from them for years to come.

So, that’s why we have all of this , even if it does seem a little shocky sometimes. ,

Jill: is he staring at me between the, the coffee mug? Is he?

Erica Hague: Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you just open up like a drawer and it’s like Izzy here is rollerblading. And this is one of the magnets, right? So rollerblading, Izzy got torch bearing, Izzy, all sorts of stuff. Wow. Izzy does everything. Izzy does everything. So, here’s our Big Mac box. So , very iconic question mark. . But yeah they branded literally everything. So it, it does pose a question of how much do you keep and what do you not hold onto?

But since a large part of this game was the commercial aspect of it, that’s something that we tried to keep in mind.

I also pulled some things out here. The pins, again, I was born in the eighties as a child that was growing up in the nineties. PIN collecting was a big deal.

Mm-hmm. and you could go and you could do pin swaps and like that is where like birthday money, Christmas money, like got saved up to buy like certain types of pens or if he went somewhere like that would be your souvenir item. Right. So the Olympic games were no different in that aspect for a lot of kids.

I did not have the ability to go since I was growing up in Ohio. But these are some of the pens that were being sort of forwarded onto, get approved for production. Okay. And this isn’t just for the games, this is also for the buildup to the games. Right. So we’ve got pens in the collection that are like so many hundreds of days out, or a thousand days out from the Olympics, which.

Hm. Three years . Right. People were real excited. so we have got a whole binder of these here.

And then we also have a scrapbook that someone made uh, and this is multiple days worth of the Olympics, and we actually have one of these in the exhibit. But I found it really interesting that they actually had a article on how the pins are made because they have a pin fee for primer Wow.

For the Olympics. there’s a lot of personal history of mine, , sorry.

Jill: That’s okay.

Erica Hague: So, all of these binders have the different numbers. These are the different numbers of the pins. But they were also used to identify like what the submission was for the Atlanta games. So, this is all one brand that. Made these designs and then was submitting them in to have approval for them.

So you see like some of them were denied. But then we also have others that were approved. So we have like Shamrock, Izzy things question mark. And then here’s a 500 day one. A 400 day one. Getting ready. Here’s an, I love Izzy one at the bottom. I mean, who doesn’t?

And all sorts of ones. So different. Izzy designs, all sorts of stuff. So here’s what I was talking about before, like we’ve got the baseball, Izzy again, we have swimming. Izzy gymnastics. Izzy Rowing. Izzy, Izzy doing everything. So. All of these are again, from the same producer.

I think this entire binder is, [00:20:00] so there’s a pin literally for anyone and everything. There’s like these charm ones that have different charms in the middle for the different events for the different countries. There was these uniting the world ones and things like that, that this was the first Olympics where all of the, it was like a hundred ninety two, four, six, I think it’s an even number. . Oh. But, but all of them were actually represented in these Olympic games. Okay. And that was the first time that that had happened?

I believe so. There’s a lot of like these uniting the world or like unification or representation of all of the countries in a variety of ways and pens were, we’re in with that. So, we got a Christmas pen, gotta get in the holiday spirit. All sorts of stuff. And we have binders and binders and binders at these pens in addition to the pins that were produced and then actually like left on backers are given separately.

So this is something that I thought was pretty interesting just as like a schlocky bit, right? Like you think of, you think of like pins are being produced when you think about the amount of pins .

Yeah, it’s incredible. I mean this is a, a lot of it’s like a four inch, five inch binder.

Yeah, it’s like a four inch binder and we have at least a dozen of them and that’s not even inclusive of all of the pens that were produced.

So it’s a lot . It’s a lot.

Something else I wanted to show you in this scrapbook though is about Carrie Str. Again, I was a gymnastics kid as a child and like watching the gymnastics team was a huge deal. You had Dominic dos this year and then you also had Carrie Str and at the time, like as a kid, I didn’t really, like, I saw that she was injured and like, I didn’t really know the impact of it.

But then they have like newspaper articles here about how her accident, like how big of it was that she like went and did all this stuff after that.

Jill: Let’s talk about these goggles.

Erica Hague: Yeah. So, the Atlanta Olympics were the first time that we, I can actually hold you here, Walter Wu.

Was in The Paralympics. And these are the goggles that he used in that.

And then we have a swim cap that’s actually on display. He is a, I think it’s an S 13, which is a level of visually impaired. Okay. and he actually set records in this Olympics.

He won six gold medals and then won bronze Oh, wow. For Canada. Okay. And then he went on to participate in two other Olympics, I believe after this one, but this was the first time that he participated in the Paralympics and some of his stuff is upstairs in the case. We also have a couple other Paralympians materials that they used during the Olympics that were either branded are Paralympic in some way or help them with doing what they did during the game. So we can take a look at those in a second.

Okay. Is there anything else that you wanna check out down here that you saw through the shelves and you were like, Lot more of

Jill: open. I would be here all day. Honestly,

Erica Hague: everything, it’s 5,000 things. Yeah. Honestly, there’s a lot.

Jill: It’s just so fascinating just how much stuff gets produced for an Olympics and especially this one.

Like they did that. They did that, huh. And it’s just, it is mind boggling.

Erica Hague: It’s a lot, a lot of stuff and it’s, and like this is just the material culture, right? So like when you think about the archival side of things and like how many boxes of materials that there were, and that’s only what was kept because there’s all these duplicate copies because it’s not just the actual Olympic games, but it’s all of the buildup to the games.

From 87 when Billy Payne started the motion to like, or no, 84, I guess, when he started thinking about the games and wanting to like prepare for them and like have Atlanta have a bid. All the way through the bid process and all the way through to like the actual events and then the cleanup of the events.

And it’s not just the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games Commission, but it’s also the city of Atlanta and the different institutions here that were involved in the process. So it was a big deal. , and I don’t know if you talked to Sarah at all about this, but when we were thinking about this exhibit, we went from our old exhibit that went through like day by day of games and we really wanted it to be different than what we had had up in the past.

And what we felt like was really important takeaway is that looking back at the Olympics, how it was a city building event and then like how that changed Atlanta because so many things got built up or torn down because of this. And so, there was a lot of positives, there was a lot of negatives.

Mm-hmm. . So, that’s just part of the story of the games and like we really felt like it was important to share all of that.

Jill: How much do people talk about the games today around here? I mean you work with the stuff, so you’re thinking about it more. Yeah. But like really does it come across or, and people go to Olympic Park, so they’re just, that’s just a place to hang out now and go to events.

Yeah. But does it kind of click?

Erica Hague: I think that like we get a lot of researchers in maybe not like a lot, a lot. Mm-hmm. , we, we get a few researchers in that are looking at specific places or spaces that we’re Olympic related. but we don’t get a lot of people coming in to look at like the day to day of the games or of long [00:25:00] term legacy of the sporting events itself.

It is very much looking at how the games impacted our day to day lives in Atlanta, in the creation of certain thorough affairs part. Things like that. So that’s more what, what we see at least of people coming in and doing research in the community research center. The collections are open to researchers by appointment.

So we don’t have many people that come in and do research into all the shocky bits . Uh, But it is something that’s a possibility. So if someone out there is interested in researching uh, 1990s mass produced goods, uh, we’ve got a lot of stuff that they can look at. But by and large, most of the people that are looking for Olympic material and come to us are looking for manuscript or visual arts material which we do have a plethora of

So this is the map of the NBC broadcast transmission signal flow plan. Right? So when uh, you look at the games from a technology standpoint they were building all of this infrastructure for broadcast technology and making sure that everything was gonna be in people’s homes via television, everywhere, as much as they could.

So they have a plan for how things are gonna be routed, how it’s going to be set up physically, and then how that’s going to be beamed across to even like different satellites, right? To be relayed over across the world. So, When the donor brought this in, I was really excited by it. And everyone else was like, I don’t understand this, but my mom working in television taught me a lot about the importance of broadcast trucks and broadcast crews, especially in the 1990s because this is how you got that dispatch out, right?

Is that you had a physical person out there with their camera. And it wasn’t like live on Instagram or live on Facebook. It was live on the TV via satellite trucks. So this was how everything got connected. And this is one of the first things that I’ve seen technology wise for the games when we are planning for this is this math.

Jill: And it’s just, you know, it’s so fascinating to see. The white water was way up in like Tennessee and all these venues that are kind of way out. Yes, yes. And they have to plan to, to get all this information here.

Erica Hague: It’s all crowded. Right. And even though we talk about the games being, like in Atlanta, there were so many different stadiums that were everywhere across the board, right?

So, they did have to really plan about what they were going, who they’re gonna send where, and what they’re gonna send, where, and how it was gonna connect and how it was gonna be broadcast. So, this is the plan for all of that , which is pretty neat.

And then one of the things that we also have here is part of the manuscript collection. So this is one of the bras, Panasonic equipment. So Panasonic was the one that actually, the company that helped build infrastructure. And so there’s this whole plan here that was discussed and it has all sorts of the agreements and things like that. Uh, With drawings and specifications. So it’ll have like all of the press stuff in the service information, But it has all of the agreements between Panasonic and what they’re going to provide and how it was gonna get fitted out. So about different, different areas. So this sort of built into this and then other materials that we have that sort of show how it was all connected on the back end that no one ever saw except for the folks that were doing, doing the actual broadcast and transmission part, so.

Jill: Right. And it’s so interesting cuz all this stuff is really still in paper. Yes. And in a way, I mean, that’s tough cuz you need physical storage, but in a, in another way, it’s kind of easier to flip through versus digital archiving

Erica Hague: Yes.

Jill: Is, is its own beast.

Erica Hague: Yes. So even though these were things that were, were probably created in like early Word documents, those weren’t ever backed up or saved necessarily. Right? So, the digital history and the digital file might be lost, but we do still have the paper copies. Uh, And sometimes these are actually more valuable as a resource from an archival standpoint because they sometimes have notations or cause they’re used copies usually.

Mm-hmm. . So someone has had it in their hands and they might have jotted notes down that were otherwise maybe lost because it was a conversation and that conversation wasn’t recorded. So this is what we have of that. So, that’s just a little bit of the archival stuff that we have. We also have tons of slides and photos.

Sometimes they are while we have access to the physical copy there’s still licensing rights held by either the Centennial Olympic Games Commission, or not the commission itself, but I guess the, the national level or the photographer themselves. Okay. So depending on how they were licensed and how they’ve gotten to us, depends on the rights.

We also have some of the VHS copies of different events of the [00:30:00] games. And so some of those you can actually see in the exhibit. So we can go up there next. Okay. And sort of see everything,

Atlanta History Center had a huge sort of role itself in sort of a lead up to the games. This building actually opened originally in 19 92, 19 93 and we actually displayed all of those quilts that were going to be given to the different

Jill: d.

Erica Hague: Here in this building . So, there’s lots of photos of that event.

And that’s where that quilt book sort of,

so, earlier when I was talking about the timeline this is the timeline that is outside the exhibit. So we felt like it was really important to give people context about how the Olympic Games here in Atlanta were being created and how they happen , and then how things continue to happen after that.

Because the Olympics themselves is an ongoing event. It’s not just a one all. So we have the history starting back in the 1890s, and then it goes all the way up to the Tokyo Olympics. Uh, We’re actually going to be picking up the Tokyo Torch uh, later this month. Oh, nice. That’ll be installed.

Soonly, . But we selected objects for different pieces of time. Sometimes it was a torch, sometimes it was a participation medal, sometimes it was a a figure. The beaver, a mascot.

So here’s Omic. Much beloved by all of the exhibition team. Omic is Beaver in Uhlin, I think the uh, native language of the First Peoples.

So that is one of our favorites. And then we also have the London mascots further. And I like the London mascots cuz you have the Olympics and the Paralympic mascots that are pretty similar.

Jill: Winlock and Mandeville let me show you Walter’s, I go backwards

Erica Hague: with exhibit, but this is the scrapbook.

The same person that made the scrapbook downstairs that I was showing you, this is one of the same ones. So they made a set of three and this is the middle. I guess it’s between day eight.

Jill: We’ve got some of the, the pins, more pins,

Erica Hague: all the pins, .

And then here are some of the materials that I mentioned. So we have Walter’s swim cap there. And then this prosthesis is also from those games, so Jeffrey McLin and volleyball. So, those are some of the materials that we’ve got.

Uh, And then scattered in here. Also items from the Olympic Games and not the Paralympics. Right? So, they were. Together, but separate kind of, but you put ’em all in the same case because all of these are sort of items that the athletes used to touch, handled, signed made sometimes. So it’s, it’s all materials that sort of speak to the celebration of their, athleticness.

Mm-hmm. , they’re sporting. But yeah that’s where we have woos cap.

And then uh, you mentioned the ribbon below. You can see the. The ribbon used on the metals here,

And then we have the paralympic metals below.

but all sorts of different stuff up here.

I said before that this is the first one that had a website and we have a capture of the website , and this is what it looked like right when he scrolled through. And we were looking for sound bits of the dial up sound for internet that was, Which you had in the nineties. Look

Exactly. And when we were finding it, we, we just kept on laughing because it was like, that was childhood sounds for us. But yeah this was the website that you would see if you had gone to the website in,

Jill: uh, wait, so Izzy has an entire family that we is are they only

Erica Hague: in the comics and not I think so.

Mm-hmm. . Wow. So, although we do see a Martin pen, so, okay. Yeah. Izzy has family and then this is our, oh my gosh. So, this is the Izzy that was outside of the welcome center. And so he is about four feet tall. El, you can hear the dial up sound.

It never gets old .

So, this is Izzy that was outside the welcome center. He’s about four feet tall. He’s very sort of rigid. He’s not like he doesn’t move or anything. He’s not animatic, but he is very excited. He’s gonna keep smile on face. Well, I can

Jill: see how he is

Erica Hague: huggable, right?

Like you didn’t wanna hug him. So there’s a lot of photos of that we’ve gotten of different people that went to the games and they’re hugging Izzy outside the welcome center. Hugging one of the people that was in the mascot costumes. We have unfortunately not retained any of the mascot costumes themselves because they were so stinky.

This is something that people don’t talk about a lot, but the games were held in the summer. In Atlanta, and if you have not been, it is hot and it is very humid. And being inside a mascot costume would be probably the worst thing that like, I cannot imagine that experience how hot it would be inside.

But because there was no way to remove all of the. Sweat from the costume. That was something that was not retained [00:35:00] in the early two thousands when these came to us. So this is one of the largest s that we have in our collection. Because of that, because we don’t have a mascot costume, we did retain some of the shoes because those were separate and those were not necessarily something that was absorbing a lot of the sweat.

So we do have a large pair of Izzy shoes. Something that’s also sort of technology related is actually this video which was produced I believe by Georgia Tech for the bid process. And it is a fly through of Atlanta as an Olympic city. So, ,

Jill: I saw something about this where during the bid process at like maybe the final presentation, everyone was like, well, look at the technology.

Erica Hague: This was like the it thing, right? In, in the nineties you didn’t have like Google Maps, you didn’t have where you could go through cities. It was very futuristic and it was a big deal. And it was a 3D modeling process that took a lot of computer power when computers were like that size, right?

So it’s a, definitely something that speaks to the technology of the buildup to the games and the begins themselves, which is something that we tried to talk about in this exhibit a lot. And we do have a lot of documentation for and it always blows the younger generation’s mind, I think when they come in here with the entire world in their pocket and their, in their phone, and it’s like with their smartphone now, they can do literally better than what we were able to do in the nineties with an entire department’s worth of computing power.

But that’s technology, right? And it keeps on moving forward and I think that it’s exciting to think about how we were there and now How we are, where are we going with that now?

So, there’s one other thing that I was gonna show you, and that’s over here. It’s the kiosk.

One of the heaviest objects that we have was this, and it’s an information center, right? And this was very futuristic when it went in because you could call on the phone and someone could talk you through purchasing.

Materials or like learning about where you’re supposed to go, or you could go in and like, watch the screen here. So there’s a whole like how to do it on the, on the front. But on the back end and underneath it’s all computing . So they had these out at different locations and they’re all branded, right?

You’ve got the torch logo, you’ve got the, the QUT of leaves on the side. It says Atlanta 96 on it. And this was very like, oh my goodness. And you can see on the side here, we’re ordering tickets and things like that. This is actually a call center for the games to have. So you can call in and order your tickets, or order them online, kind of, So, uh, lots of photos like this that are just. Pretty fascinating,

Jill: so, wow. Wow. Yeah. Excellent.

Erica Hague: . But this was a really fun exhibit to work on.

Um, One, because of the nostalgia aspect for me. Growing up and this being my first Olympic games that I really like absorbed. But we also tried to keep a lot of the nineties feel, vibe and feel in the exhibit, which but not in a dated way, . Mm-hmm. . So we kept a lot of the color schemes that you see throughout the games, and our entire color palette was actually pulled from different either materials that the games themselves were using for their materials, for like their marketing package or other things like photographs and, and things that were very iconic of the games.

So when you come in here, we want you to feel like you are kind of stepping into the nineties and Olympics in, in a good way.

Jill: Was there anything that surprised you knowing, like you experienced the games as a kid? Yeah, but like when you look

Erica Hague: at it as an. Is

Jill: there, what surprised you when you pulled the st when you were working at the

Erica Hague: um, this wasn’t necessarily a surprise, but like, as a kid, I wasn’t here in Atlanta.

Right. So I didn’t get to experience any of the buildup of the games or any of the. Community issues that were happening. So when they were building out the games, like there were entire neighborhoods that were displaced and there were entire communities that were gone because of this. And sometimes there was conversations with the community about that, and then sometimes there was not.

And so that’s something where that was not surprising to me, knowing like the history of the United States as a whole. Uh, And there’s a lot of that in our, in our history. But that was something that I learned a lot more about during the process of this. And that’s something that we did wanna talk about in this exhibit.

And I think that we do talk about it to a certain extent because when you talk about any sort of building of a. Stadium or a large project like this. There’s a lot of change that happens because of that and not all of it’s positive. I think that the games had impact good and bad. I think I said that before, but uh, that’s one of the things that’s sort of a legacy on both ends.

So, That’s something that we did wanna touch on in the exhibit. And there’s plenty of different, this area, especially about different things that were going on. So that’s something that I learned a lot about. I also learned a lot about the Paralympic games, which this was the first time that the Paralympic games were held like in conjunction and planned with the Olympics.

So there is [00:40:00] a lot of planning of, of both events parallel to each other and not necessarily like pushing one off to the side or having one be you know, not as important as the other. So lots of things about that very interesting to learn. So. Excellent. I think that was, that was for me, those were interesting things.

Erica Hague: I also got to know our collections a lot better. So it, it is interesting to know just how many Izzy things that we have in our collection. When we were ramping up for this exhibit. We were also working on a rebranding project for the museum itself. And so part of that was working with photographers, one of which is a really big into shoes and also really big into the Olympics.

So he showed him the Izzy shoes and he like lost his mind. He was like, these are amazing. And things like that where it’s like really bringing joy into different parts of, of history,

Jill: so. Excellent. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Erica. And also thank you to Monique Rojas for arranging everything for us.

Alison: You geeked out so hard. , I was not with you, so I listened to, I, I’ve rather read the transcript and listened to your tape, and I could feel your geekiness just oozing off the paper. You were so excited.

Jill: And, and literally we went into one Rollie shelf, which had about three layers of shelving in it, if I remember correctly. And then the bottom half was drawers. So they had little narrow drawers that you’d pull out and it’d just be pins and flat stuff, all this stuff. And the shelves went pretty far back. I should have taken a picture of how long they did go back.

we’re gonna put a video up of the episode in YouTube and we’ll also have pictures on our website show notes version of this. So check those out if you’d like to see what we talked about, honest Pete, it really was. Is that the medal ribbon? What are you doing with the role of medal ribbon?

Alison: Right? So the one picture that you sent me was that giant role of medal ribbon because you know me so well, you knew that that would be the thing that got me so excited and I’m thinking, can you imagine wrapping your holiday gifts with that ribbon and presenting it to like super fan Sarah?

Jill: Oh my gosh,

And somebody in the organizing committee did that. Like they had extra ribbon and they just, anytime they had a gift, which probably was often given, it was Atlanta, 1996. They probably used that ribbon as well, I would think. I mean, who wouldn’t want to,

Alison: I’d put that stuff in my hair. Now,

I’m very proud of you for not pocketing anything. Nicely done.

Jill: No, I do have, I do have some standards.

[00:43:22] Patron Shout-Out

Jill: Oh, speaking of, who has standards, our wonderful patrons and at the time of the year where we give shoutouts to our gold medal level patrons, and today we are celebrating Dan Meyer.

Dan is a longtime listener of the show and so much fun

Alison: and definitely contributes to our Facebook group. And messages me on Instagram, which I love.

Jill: Mm-hmm. and he messages me on Twitter, which I love, so it’s awesome. Dan also has his own Olympics newsletter, so we’ll put a link to How to get it in the show notes.

Alison: And how do people get their own Shout out, Jill.

Jill: there are a ton of ways to support the show.

We have one time options. We have brand new commissions, so you can have your pet be our mascot for a week or you can. Close out the show by telling everyone to keep flame alive, and there’s also ongoing ways you can support the show. Go to flame alive pod.com/support for more information.

And Dan, thank you so much for being a patron and for supporting us financially and keeping our flame alive. We really appreciate you.

[00:44:27] History Moment – Albertville 1992

Jill: Uh, That sound means it is time for our history moment and all year long we have been talking about Albertville 1992 as it is the 30th anniversary of those games. My turn for a story. We’re getting close to the end of the year.

Alison: I, I know it’s a little sad. We’re gonna have to say goodbye to Albertville again.

It’s like breaking up twice. .

Jill: But what do you got from me today? I got, I promised more biathlon, and so yes, there’s more [00:45:00] biathlon. Today we are going to the women’s side of the competition 1992 was the first time women competed in the bilon at the Olympics. And like the men, this, this was nice. the men had three events, the women had three events. The women’s events were the same, just shorter. and that happens today. Still, the women’s events are always shorter, but they had a sprint race, an individual race, and a relay.

Interesting thing about the relay for the women, it only had three women on a. Usually there are four, and today there are four. But for the first time in the Olympics, they only had three per team.

Alison: I wonder if it was just to allow more countries to participate because was a relatively new event. So did enough countries have four Olympic

level that they would wanna put in it?

Jill: It depends because the event had been. Eight world champs. It had been in the World Championship since 84 dominated by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had won all of those world champs. So even though the U S S R had dissolved just weeks before the games, the unified team came in as a favorites to win the relay.

You can actually watch this race. They have the full race on olympics.com, a full replay of it. we’ll put the link in the show notes. I, I did watch it and it’s the feed with no commentary except for every once in a while you can hear a cameraman till and somebody take it out of the way.

which is awesome. And in true 1990 style, almost no graphic. So you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know who is who. The 1990s fashion made it so hard to tell the countries apart because everybody is wearing some puke explosion of teal and fusia and purple. And I could not tell any for the life of me.

I couldn’t remember whose bib was whose, I mean, I could tell the US. Their suit was blue on top with red and white vertical stripes on the bottom and said USA proud. As USAs want to do. But everybody else, and I think even the unified team, the different members of the team had different suits on, which made it worse.

Wait, they’re not wearing the same thing. And then I thought, well, that must be the unified team because it can all get the same clothes.

Alison: They’re unified from different parts,

Jill: I guess so. So, race starts off as planned cuz unified team is gunning to win after shooting the first shooting. They’re in first place, but we have a little sign that this race is not going to be as you think.

It’s going to end up because in second place out of shooting the first shooting, and we’ve still got a lot of race ahead of us. Second place am mere 30 seconds behind is China.

Alison: I’m surprised that you were even competing.

Jill: I know in 92 they were sporting a very lovely greenish teal with red violet accent suit.

I know I had the hardest time going this China because it wasn’t a red suit. It was this, that teal, that green, that 19 early nineties green.

Anyway a third place coming outta shooting one was Bulgaria, where Sporting Purple and Fia, and you don’t hear about them today at all. I mean, they’re still Bulgarian by athletes, but they just, you don’t hear about them. And fourth was France, then Italy and then Germany, who was a favorite to also be on the medal stand here.

And they have who became legendary Ushi Diesel, who is one of the legends of Bilon in Germany. This is her first games out of like five. Olympics that she was in she ended up missing a target. So this race format was you get your regular magazine of five bullets to shoot down the five targets, and then you get up to three extra bullets to shoot down anything you missed.

And once you’ve run out of the eight, Shots, then you had to ski a penalty loop for every missed target. So that’s what happened to Ushi. She missed a target and she had to ski up. Other interesting note about how the setup was today, you have those three extra rounds in your rifle. You carry them with you.

They had like a pole with little cups attached to it, one at standing height and one at prone height, and you would grab your extra bullets from this.

Alison: Cup of bullets, , don’t confuse it for your water bottle.

Jill: another bad sign for the unified team. Their first first leg skier, yo and Belova. She took a wrong turn.

Alison: I am always so surprised cuz we hear about this often in marathons, in cross country races. How is that possible? How are there not people standing there guiding them? If there’s a place where you could take a wrong turn?

I never understand this.

Jill: I’m wondering if there are not enough people. I think there was one person there, cause I kind of saw they did a little replay of [00:50:00] it, but it’s really hard to tell. She just kind of turned around cause I think she went towards the finish line section a a lot of times in by athlon they had the finish line separate from the way you go into the penalty loop, or not the penalty, but they’re all kind of connected and there’s a few different wrong turns you can make if you don’t do it correctly.

Alison: Clearly a need for more volunteers. And that is, that is never a job we talked about during Beijing, but clearly they need more of them.

Jill: Yeah. But in Beijing, they actually had their loop set up pretty easily. that one made sense to me. There was no real way you could not take the wrong turn out of the shooting range, to be quite honest.

So. Other teams. After Belova takes this wrong turn, other teams start catching up. A Chinese wonderful shooters not that great on skis, so they start falling off and now they’re a non threat anymore. Then the unified teams shooting falls apart. Elaina Belova has to do a penalty loop and their second skier on fe Red Sova also has to do a penalty loop.

So it is not looking good for them. Germany does stay outta the penalty loop in Lake too, so they are moving up. But who else is showing up? France home team France did not have much of a team as you wondered about the number of by athletes in the women’s side. They only had nine certified female by athletes in the entire country.

according to NBC Olympics, and one of their best by athletes Delphine, Haman Burle was out sick. Could not do this race according to Olympia. So, but they’re hanging in there, they’re doing really well. They have the home team behind them too. Like three unified team takes back the lead. But after the prone shooting Francis on very quickly overtook gal me ov on the ski course.

Germany’s Acha Makis right there. So it’s coming down to the last shooting and this is always what you, you love in Byon. Who is gonna get the last shooting? done first and get back on that ski course. So it really comes down to Germany versus France, and they both have to go to extra bullets.

But France gets out first on Brianna skis, her little heart out. Everyone’s exhausted. You can tell everyone is so exhausted and Germany’s closing in. But can Maki catch?

Oh, and as Brianna is skiing, the last section, like the entire coaching staff is skiing down the sidelines. yelling her on that is one nice thing with no commentary. You can also hear the

She skis the fastest leg of the entire competition by over 45 seconds. Wow. Yeah. Gets gold. Germany took silver. Unified team, takes the bronze.

Alison: Wow.

[00:53:03] TKFLASTAN Update

Alison: Welcome to sh.

Jill: It is the time of the show where we check in with our team, keep the flame alive. These are past guests of the show who make up our citizens of our very own country. Of sh quiet week this week.

Alison: Yes. But this is fantastic. Congratulations to Pin collector Don Bigsby, who got married in

May.

Jill: Yay, Don. Table tennis player, Millie Tapper did a Vember fundraiser and ran 60 kilometers across five different countries raising $530 to support men’s mental health research.

Alison: And Kelly Chang and partner Sarah Hughes will be competing this weekend at the Elite 16 Toque Beach Volleyball Pro Tour event in Torque Australia.

They won the Australia Challenger last week.

[00:53:57] Paris 2024 Update

Jill: All right. Today, as the show is released, it is December 1st. The ticket lottery sign up starts today, runs through January 31st, so you may see a lot of it articles saying that ticket sales have started, but they haven’t started. It is signing up for the lottery. I don’t know about you, but the history of that’s already driven me nuts.

Alison: Well, I can’t believe how many Instagram posts Facebook posts, email messages from all these different organizations about ticket sales start this week. And I just wanna look at them and say, Laia , you are being inaccurate.

Jill: It’s true. It’s very misleading. Signing up for the lottery starts now goes through the 31st.

It’s not a first come first serve basis on the ticket lottery. So you have until January 31st to sign up and still have an equal chance to [00:55:00] get in win the draw. Although you were, if you are not a member of the club, you have a less than equal chance cuz the club members get first dibs on all this stuff. but you still have a chance.

Paris 2024 organizers have explained how the ticket sales process is going to work. So they’re calling it a Make your Games Pack. clever title. a seats are arranged in five different categories. So there’s first category, then a, B, C, D.

The highest ticket prices will be 980 Euros, which is currently just over a thousand bucks. Yeah, well, you know, the big ticket items are big ticket. Don’t worry though, not everything’s gonna be that expensive. They are selling a million tickets at 24 euros each and almost half of the tickets for up for grabs will be 50 euros or less.

So that’s not, that’s not bad. There’s still opportunities. So with this, make your games pack ticket lottery. Event you register for the lottery. While you wait for the lottery to happen, you look at the website and see what tickets you want to buy. This is kind of the reverse of the process they had before.

So you had to go through an authorized ticket reseller, and what they would do is say, Hey, Sign up for a lottery, tell us what tickets you want and we’ll do a drawing for all the people who want those tickets. This is the reverse of that. This is a, you tell us you want tickets and then we’ll tell you if you get the opportunity to buy them.

And once you do get the opportunity, then you can like pick what you want.

Alison: Basically sign up for the lottery. If you wanna go to Paris, if you’re even thinking that you may wanna go to Paris, just sign up for the lottery because it doesn’t cost you anything to sign up. It doesn’t cost you anything when you’re chosen.

It only costs you when you actually then purchase the tickets.

Jill: Right. And even if you purchase tickets and you. End up not being able to go. You can resell your tickets. They’ll have a, a ticket resales platform. That’s the only place you can resell your tickets, and they will have to be sold for face value.

So there’s no money making opportunity off of this. No bots trying to buy up all the tickets and have a massive secondary market going that will price everybody out.

Alison: Okay. That’s, I, I only have one problem with this. Mm-hmm. , why is it first A, B, C. Oh, I have Why have they mixed numbers and letters? Come on.

Jill: Maybe they didn’t know which accent? The E would have .

Alison: Okay. That’s actually a fair point,

Jill: Oh yeah, I did wonder that too. I was like, oh, really? But they kind of gave examples of what. Make your gains pack could be like, cuz you can get three session a, a pack has three sessions from a range of sports. So for 72 euros you could get a pack that had athletics, handball and rugby, gymnastics, judo and water polo.

You could have your pack take place in a whole one city, that kind of thing. So it sounds like you have some, a lot more flexibility. I, I do wonder. If you go, oh, I want these packs, and then you log on with your lottery 48 hour window. When you, if you do win the lottery, you get like 48 hours to buy your tickets.

How fast the things you want will be sold out.

Alison: Well, that’s always the case. You always have to have. Choices in all the different, high value choices like gymnastics and athletics. Mm-hmm. , and then some less popular choices. So you’re saying they use handball and rugby, so be prepared in each column.

Jill: Right. So you’re saying you should have a first choice then an A, B, C, D plan.

Alison: I would never say that because I would keep it consistent.

Jill: Every , every ticketing account will be able to get a maximum of 10 packs, so you could get up to 30 tickets. No opening or closing ceremonies tickets are being sold in this round. Also, no tickets available for surfing. So I kind of wonder if they’re even gonna have tickets, what kind of spectators they’ll have for surfing and if it’ll just be like, this is for the people who live here.

The final day for Make Your Games Pack sales will be March 15th and, That’s the day that drawings for individual tickets will go up. So this is just, you’re gonna have to, if you get in this lottery, you’re gonna have to make a ticket pack, and you’re gonna have to go to get three tickets for three different sessions.

Then there’s gonna be a, I just want one ticket for X. That lottery drawing will start in March and on April 21st, and that sales process will happen in May, 2023.

Hopefully it’s not complicated. Hopefully it’s easier.

Alison: It actually, if you’ve ever registered for classes on an online system, this feels very familiar. Like you always have to have a couple of classes that you know are gonna be no problem to get. And then there’s always a couple you’re like, Ooh, those are really popular than they may be gone.

I [01:00:00] think explaining it is actually harder than doing it. Okay. If the system works. The way it should.

Jill: Yes, and I hope they’re learning from the World Cup. Have you heard the problems with the World Cup tickets on their app?

Alison: Crashy Crashy

Jill: crashes and tickets disappear from your ticket wallet and all of a sudden you can’t get into the stadium that it.

Hopefully they are learning from this and will have all those problems troubleshooted. Because that, that does not sound fun.

Alison: Hey, guess what?

Jill: also fun. Paris 2024 took some flack for the fact that most of their mascots are going to be made in China and hey, They found more capacity at the factories of France to do more mascots made in France.

So now they’re, they’re roughly doing 50% more production there. They were going to do 2,700 freezes a week, and now they’re going to be able to make 5,000 a week, and they will also produce 100,000 Friesian caps. So if you wanted the hat, Skip the beret. If you’re, if you went to Paris 2024 to buy a Paris 2024 Beret, skip that by a Friesian cap instead.

Alison: I wonder if people, it’ll depend on the weather, if people will actually wear the caps.

Jill: Good question

Alison: If will it become a thing?

Jill: Good question. Because there’s always something, that’s the thing, whether it’s the mittens in the winter or like the sunglasses with the rings, Or the, funky sneakers.

There’s always something.

Alison: Yes, there’s always a fashion statement of that. Games.

Jill: Right? And remember how we thought it was gonna be the umbrella hats for Tokyo,

Alison: right? But there, there was nobody there. So there was no fashion statement for Tokyo?

Jill: No. So, oh, Paris, you got something to set a trend. I’m excited about that.

[01:01:57] International Olympic Committee Update

Jill: Okay. The IOC has announced that it’s going to have an E-Sports week in June from June 22 to 25, 20 23. It’s going to be a celebration of hybrid, physical, and simulated sports, the whole thing is gonna be like a festival or conference type thing with, with panels and stuff, but they’re also going to have the first in-person live finals of the Olympic E-Sports series.

I know you’re excited about.

Alison: It actually could be interesting.

Jill: Well, because we’ve thought of eSports as generally being just, you sit in the chair and play a video game. And a lot of what this, the games that they play in this series seem to be physically motivated. So you ride a bike, you ride an ex cycle basically through A course that you watch on a screen, same deal with like a rowing machine or there, there’s different, things that that look like.

It could be a lot more active than other eSports. Not that those don’t take stamina, and we know that that. eSport does take stamina and physical ability, but it’s, this seems to be a little bit different.

Alison: it reminds me of the old we sports. Did you ever play that? Yes. Yeah. So that you’d run through the fields and you’d play bowling, or you’d play golf or tennis and those.

Those were very good exercise. Yeah. Especially when you could. Go outside, say in the winter in the northeast, or it got dark at four 30 like it is now. That was a nice indoor alternative and the IOC has been pushing very much for how do inner city kids or kids in poorer countries have access to sports and to play and to getting more physically active.

And this can be a way, especially when space. Is a real issue and you don’t have the facilities to get kids to try some different things. Right. So I’m actually not upset about this.

Jill: Right. And the, the way that that youth are engaged by video games, this could be something good and, and I’m not gonna discount the fact that maybe it’s something that you and I could be good at too.

Alison: I know I was killer at we Bowling . They always jumped up and down for me.

Jill: There will be more details out early next year of how you can get involved. So we will take note and I’m not, never say never, Alison.

[01:04:36] International Paralympic Committee Update

Jill: Oh boy. The International Paralympic Committee has laid down the hammer on Russia and Belarus. They had their extraordinary general assembly and the membership voted to suspend both of those countries. That means they lose all rights and privileges of I P C membership and according with, in accordance with the IPC constitution.

So basically they can’t vote in [01:05:00] anything. They can’t participate in meetings. They also cannot participate in I P C activities such as competitions. Russian bells can appeal this decision, but if that doesn’t go through, then the next time they can be have their membership reactivated is through a vote of the general assembly, which won’t happen until the final quarter of 2023.

Alison: and the big consequence of this is that none of the athletes could participate in any of the qualifiers for Paris 2024. So basically, by definition, even if. Russia and Belarus has been re have been reinstated by the time Paris comes around if they’ve qualified. No quotas. If they’ve qualified. No athletes.

Too bad.

Jill: Yeah. it’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out.

Alison: And i, despite what I may have just sounded like, I do not feel bad for them.

At all, even, you know what I do? I of course feel bad for the athletes. I feel bad for any athlete that has, is kept from competing when they are trying. But how many times? How many times and how is starting a war not enough? Can we just turn our heads to what Russia has done.

Jill: Right. Huh.

Alison: Well, we can only hope that this is a little bit of solace for Ukraine to see that there is international condemnation on a very, very high. For what’s gone on.

Jill: That’s gonna do it for this week. Let us know what your favorite moments and souvenirs are from Atlanta 1996.

Alison: You can get in touch with us by email at flame alive pod gmail.com. Call or text us at (208) 352-6348. That’s 2 0 8 Flame it. Our social handle is at Flame Alive Pod. And be sure to join the Keep the Flame Alive Podcast Group on Facebook where this week we are voting for Stan’s official animal.

Jill: This is a surprising vote so far, so I’m very curious to see how it goes. I’m excited to have an official animal, to be quite honest. Can’t wait to see what you all choose. Next week we will get an update on the LA Summer Olympics from Izzy Sarlo to Time Olympian in Rugby seven s who is now an associate in commercial and consumer insights for LA 2028.

That is a good conversation that we are looking forward to sharing with you. So thank you so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive.