BY DC CUEVA
When we rang in the new year a few long months ago, the year 2020 meant several things to many people. In the view of the Gregorian calendar, this is a leap year, and it meant Ja Rule officially celebrated his birthday for just the 10th time in his life on February 29th. Come November, the world's eyes will be on the race for the White House in a divided America. And despite what has been a rough year for all of us, many of the biggest holidays of this year have or will be taking place on the weekend... and as we speak to you here, it is now officially 4/20 month as well.
An even numbered year also means that it's also an Olympic year, which means this blogger gets to spend most of nineteen straight days watching the only program on television that he avidly looks forward to actually binge watching. And instead of scripted content, it's both live sports and events that he loves from all around the spectrum which only receive their time in the spotlight every even year, all in the name of gold medals in front of flags and a burning flame. It's the love that this writer has of the whole sports world - not just the NBA and his Bay Area teams - that make the Olympics the favorite sporting event of this blogger.
Once the flame finally is lit on July 23, 2021 in what will be the first of two Olympics to be held within a year's time span (the Beijing 2022 Winter Games will take place less than six months after the Tokyo Closing Ceremony on August 8), one of those who will be glued to his TV and mobile devices for a total of forty days of Olympic mania is one who is a two-time champion on MTV's The Challenge. But, he can also lay claim to being the resident superfan of all things Olympics in the MTV Reality family - not surprising for someone who was a swimmer in college and who's met those behind some of the Olympics' biggest moments of the past two decades. And he also happens to be part of a Real World alumni class turned Challenge royalty that's just as good as gold.
Summer in Florida usually means that you'd have equal time being indoors enduring the rain as being outdoors in the tropical climate. It is also hurricane season, and when the RW Key West cast came south it was remnants of Hurricane Katrina was barreling through Florida, delaying the cast's arrival to their beautiful pier-side home. It was the start of a chaotic summer in paradise as two more twisters came on-shore, and where Wilma saw the cast and crew ride out the high winds that tore apart a refugee hotel they were staying in Orlando.
In the grand scheme of things, this was the cast that gave us gold... Challenge gold that is: Johnny "Bananas" Devenanzio made his MTV debut that year as that good guy from Orange County who ran around in a Scooby-Doo costume around Penn State with no idea that he'd win a record six Challenge titles, and is now gunning for an untouchable seventh on Total Madness. And once upon a time, his girlfriend was an Olympic champion: 2006 gold medal snowboarder Hannah Teter.
Paula Meronek also went onto The Challenge after Key West, but it would take some time before she would also break through when after much heartbreak, she won two titles in the ladder half of her ten-season career (both, incidentally, on Rivals I & II) before retiring to become a married mom to two kids. But they were both beaten to the top of the victory podium by Janelle Casanave, who was on Team Rookies on The Gauntlet III, the beneficiaries of Big Easy's misfortune twelve years ago.
Tyler then went onto The Challenge where early on he and Bananas became rivals during that early tenure, and it came to a head on Cutthroat when they were supposed to meet each other in the Gulag until a certain special guest arrived to crash that party. And they were paired on the first Rivals season where they won the last elimination over C.T. and Adam en route to the title... his second after Cutthroat a season earlier.
Tyler's was born into an athletic family in his dad being an athletic coach and his older brother being a soccer player, and Tyler followed in their footsteps to the sporting arena to become a soccer and swimming athlete in high school and college. He had eyes on being on the U.S. national swimming team and then at the Olympics... but a freak accident saw him break two sections of his back, and spent most of the following year in a cast from the neck down. He had seen his dream of competing on the world's biggest stage get away, but his obsession with the Olympic movement didn't -- and for first proof of it, it can be traced back to his very first season...
On his Real World season - which debuted after the 2006 Winter Games in Torino, Italy (and where Champs vs. Pros competitor Lindsay Jacobellis had her famous meltdown), he got to welcome veteran Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard to a party there in Key West. And when the house made their way to Spain for their vacation, the one place Tyler looked forward to going was Barcelona, which was where the basketball Dream Team made its debut, and was the last Games to feature the former Soviet Union (which competed as the Unified Team). But it was after his time on MTV was up that Tyler has continued to explore his fandom for all things related to the five rings.
The last time the world got together in the name of sport and peace was two years ago in South Korea for the 2018 Winter Games just a 60-mile drive from the North Korean border in Pyeongchang. It was where 2014 freestyle medalist Gus Kenworthy competed with pride but missed another trip to the podium just months after being on Champs vs. Pros a year earlier. But the one sport Tyler looks forward to most in wintertime is figure skating - the most watched of any Olympic sport in the U.S.While the United States has not medaled in its most-prestigious discipline, the ladies' event, since a silver for Sasha Cohen in 2006 in Torino (and no golds since Sarah Hughes beat Michelle Kwan in Salt Lake City), Mirai Nagasu offered a memorable moment in her landing a triple Axel in the opening team event. It's a common jump for the men, but a difficult one for the ladies - and only one American, Tonya Harding, pulled off the move years before her & Nancy Kerrigan became front page headlines... and Tyler got to meet Mirai last fall at L.A. Comic Con.
In the years since Rio, the elegant sport of gymnastics was turned upside down for everyone related to USA Gymnastics. On the mat, the American women have continued to dominate in no small part due to the brilliance that is Simone Biles... but off of it their world was rocked by the allegations of sexual misconduct saw a former doctor of the U.S. women's team be brought behind bars. And it led to wholesale changes for both the national governing body of the sport and to the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee in putting the safety of its athletes in the list of its top priorities.
In a sport that no longer gives perfect scores of 10.00 after a 2000's retooling of the points system, in the team's first rotation of the vault O.C. native McKayla Maroney stuck her landing perfectly that was worthy of a perfect 10, giving Team USA an unassailable lead for the rest of the final. McKayla also made waves on the Internet for her meme-worthy expression of not being impressed after she was robbed of gold in the individual event final for the vault towards the end of competition.
A year after retiring from competitive gymnastics prior to the 2016 Olympics, Maroney joined with dozens of other former gymnasts to take a stand against doctor Larry Nassar for his actions of molesting her during her career. It was the most prominent case in the sports world involving the #MeToo movement, and it earned her and the other victims ESPN's ESPY Courage Award bearing the name of the late tennis great Arthur Ashe. And just last month, McKayla followed in the path of 2004 Olympic all-around champion Carly Patterson and become a singer, releasing her first single.
But last year, Tyler met up with the former gymnast for a session of yoga, and he captioned on IG, "Casual Monday afternoon workout with Gymnastics ICON @mckaylamaroney01. Such an inspirational athlete & advocate! I’ll see ya in yoga Girl!!"
For a nation that loves its sport so much they're down to wake up in the middle of the night to watch their athletes in the world stage, Australia they didn't have to stay up in 2000 when Sydney hosted The XXVII Olympiad and gave the world a memorable, well-organized Games after the Salt Lake bid scandal of two years earlier, and where the competition excelled down under. In its signature moment, Australian sprinter Cathy Freeman won the one gold medal her nation expected her to win in the women's 400 meters, a week after she lit the flame at the Opening Ceremony and carried the hopes of her whole nation & her Aboriginal people on her shoulders.
That heart-stopping gold was one of three the "Thorpedo" won in Sydney - including one in the 400 free an hour before swimming that anchor leg, and the other in the 800 relay in the same Olympics where Phelps made his debut also as a teenager. And it's among nine career Olympic medals the Aussie would collect in his career, including gold over the American and Pieter van den Hoogenband of the Netherlands in a 200-meter final called "the Race of the Century" in Athens. And itt came after Thorpe squandered a chance to defend his 400 gold in Greece when he false started at national trials and disqualified himself in embarrassing fashion.
As seen below on IG, Thorpe was among the notable athletes Tyler mingled with Olympic-themed L.A. fundraiser Gold Meets Golden in Beverly Hills during Golden Globes weekend that attracted Nicole Kidman, Zoey Deutch, Ben Platt, Naomi Watts, Rocketman's Taron Egerton and Rocky's daughter, Sistine Stallone. The invitation list also included Olympic legends Nadia Comaneci, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Greg Louganis, Kristi Yamaguchi and Apolo Ohno, as well as past medalists Daniel Leyva, Dara Torres and even the Hulk, Lou Ferrigno. And Tokyo hopefuls were also there including 400-meter hurdler Dalikah Muhammad, fencer Monica Aksamit, members of the women's water polo and softball teams, and UCLA gymnast turned viral star Katelyn Ohashi, among other Olympians and Paralympians.
Within Olympic circles, no race is perhaps more anticipated then when the world's best cities together come together to battle and to see who gets to host sports' biggest event. As the more lucrative of the two events, Moscow, Athens, London, Rio de Janiero and Mexico City have had a chance to host the Summer Games. And as ice skating, snowboarding, curling and other winter sports continue to grow in popularity globally, Vancouver and Salt Lake City have been recent hosts of the Winter Games.
But the 2020's will be a golden time for Olympic host cities as five incredible metropolis will host not just the Summer Games, but the Winter Games as well. Next year, Tokyo will host the Summer Games for the second time having done so in 1964, then Beijing will become the first to host both a summer and winter Olympics when the Winter Games take place there shortly after in 2022. Paris will welcome back the Games 100 years since it lasted them in 2024, and last year the Italian cities of Milan & Cortina earned the privilege of hosting in 2026.
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| O.C. Register |
The task of organizing an Olympics years before it's held is a complex job and takes just as long as the road athletes take from when they begin their careers before they climax in front of the world. The person tasked with organizing the early phases of the growth of the LA 2028 Games is the responsibility of the president of the LA Olympic Organizing Committee: agent & entertainment executive Casey Wasserman, head of a sports marketing & talent management company working with members of the U.S. Women's National Team, Russell Westbrook and other entities. And together with the USOPC, LA 2028 will also help establish sponsorship deals in the U.S. that will last until those Games in eight years' time.
Tyler met Mr. Wasserman during a 2016 LA Pride event when the LA bid committee had their eyes set on the 2024 Games before the IOC's compromise the following year, and he's also met shooting medalist Vincent Hancock, skater Gracie Gold, and multiple alpine medalist Julia Mancuso.
It's one thing to watch the Olympics on TV as it takes place on the other side of the world like the four billion who do so... it's another to actually be there and immerse yourself in the global gathering of sport in the host city itself. Tyler is one of those fortunate to have had this item crossed off his bucket list and something most of us can only envy, and this came even before his adopted hometown of L.A. earned the right to welcome the world again. And he told Access Hollywood, "The Olympics mean everything to me. Most of these athletes will never become millionaires. They're out there for themselves. And that's how I feel about my approach to life also."
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| Access Hollywood |
Their common goal on the site was to go to Beijing just to soak in the atmosphere of people from around the world coming to a new China for a Games that would become notable in many ways. The only problem was they had to find whichever ways they could to attend events and pony up a bargain for those precious tickets to any of the 300+ medal events of those 2008 Games, let alone the more high-profile events. Mission accomplished in that category: they saw gymnastics in the Team USA women with Nastia Liukin, Shawn Johnson and Tyler's friend Alicia Sacramone, among others.
But the big one came with the very first event, and one of the most memorable nights in Olympic history: the Opening Ceremony on 8/8/08 at 8PM, with the date & time being chosen as that number is associated with prosperity in the host nation. Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou led a production that cost $300 million U.S. (2.13 billion yuan) to make and which celebrated aspects of Chinese culture on a large scale. And the grand spectacle left fans, the media and by a record global TV audience in awe once gymnast Li Ning lit the flame in dramatic fashion at night's end.
That Opening Ceremony was one of thirteen events Tyler & Charley attended in Beijing, where they spent $3,000 (roughly 21,000 yuan) to attend that spectacular. But an equally remarkable moment came on the ride home to the U.S. midway through the Games' second week...
The guys shared a flight to Washington, D.C. with Michael Phelps' mom Debbie and sisters Whitney & Hilary, whose isolated reactions to their son's Olympic triumphs became just as known to viewers in the U.S. as the calls of all his races by NBC's Rowdy Gaines and Dan Hicks. Tyler told Access that he lost his mind when they were on the same flight as them, and after he pleaded with flight staff during the long journey back home the women who had seen their son become golden eight times in Beijing were deservedly upgraded to first class.
These meetings and experiences are only part of an Olympic fandom Tyler Duckworth has had all his life when he was a swimmer aiming to be part of an Olympic team, and then as a fan who pauses what everyone else does to watch the Games. This passion for the Games is something he cherishes as the two times he's been triumphant on The Challenge and the lifelong bonds he's formed with his Key West roommates and fellow Real World & Challenge alumni. When that John Williams score becomes the most hum-worthy music next year, think not only of the athletes who will entertain us in Tokyo, but also those like him who worship the five rings.
- I AM DC
#DCBLOG
YouTube Clips Courtesy: NBC Olympics/USOC, Seven Network Australia & International Olympic Committee; Olympic Imagery (except Tyler's Opening Ceremony pic) Courtesy: Getty Images.
