Falling in love with the Olympics🥇💌

I played soccer growing up — give it up for us goalkeepers! — and remember when the U.S. women’s national team captured the gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. They pulled it off just a 10-minute drive from my childhood home in Athens, Ga., the University of Georgia’s Sanford Stadium playing host to that historic match. I was hooked on watching these powerful athletes chase a lifelong dream, and I loved learning their stories.

One of my favorite things to ask athletes now is when they discovered their sport and how they fell in love with it. So, as we sit about five weeks from the start of the 2024 Paris Olympics, here are a few athlete origin stories so you, dear reader, can have a better understanding of who they are.

Sunny Choi was, um, drunk when she first encountered breaking. (The cool kids call it breaking, not break dancing!) She was in her first year at Penn and was feeling a bit lost, as most college freshmen do. She was out late after imbibing and she saw some dancers breaking on campus and thought, “Oh, that looks fun.” The group of dancers invited her to practice and she quickly immersed herself in the scene at Penn and in the greater Philly breaking community. The former gymnast loved being upside down, but there was more to it for her.

 “Over time, I really fell in love with exploring my body’s physical limits and artistic expressions,” the 34-year-old first-time Olympian said. “I had never really done anything creative in my life before.”

Jagger Eaton’s parents were competitive gymnasts in their youth, his mother a two-time national champion at Utah. Eaton took those athletic skills and put them on a skateboard, finding the feeling of belonging at the KTR skatepark in his native Mesa, Ariz. It’s still his favorite place to skate. “As a young kid, I was kinda always moving in and out of homes, so the skate park was always the place I went,” the 23-year-old bronze medalist said, “and skating there with my whole family is just the greatest experience.”  

Ashleigh Johnson, who grew up in Miami, and her four siblings were in swim lessons from an early age, their mother fearful of them falling into their backyard pool and drowning. Their swim lessons led to being on swim teams in the summer. But then they discovered water polo, Johnson taking to goalkeeping pretty quickly.

“We just loved water polo because it was social, it was engaging, we could fight,” the 29-year-old and two-time gold medalist said with a laugh.

Ah, yes, fighting with siblings, the original Olympic sport. All jokes aside, how did you first get hooked on the Olympics? Drop me a line at rbowers@gannett.com! If you haven’t already, please fill out this reader survey for what you want to see in this newsletter. See you next week!