Paste BN staff covering Rio Summer Olympics
Sam Amick (NBA reporter). This is his first Olympics. He will focus on men’s and women’s basketball in Rio. He is one of our most prolific and successful reporters on Twitter with 142,000 followers.
Nancy Armour (Columnist). This is her 11th. She will write general columns, but will be spending quite a bit of time at gymnastics. “I was fortunate enough to see Usain Bolt in both the 100- and 200-meter finals in Beijing, and those races will stick with me forever. The dominance with which he won was something in itself to behold, but the utter joy when he crossed the finish line – and before in the 100 meters – was infectious. Bolt turned the Bird’s Nest into his own party, but we were all invited.”
Nicole Auerbach (College basketball reporter). Rio will be her second Olympics. London was her first. She will be our primary swimming reporter. She has truly immersed herself in the sport of swimming. In the lead-up to the 2016 Games, this recreational swimmer jumped in the pool with 11-time Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte to take a swim lesson. Her butterfly needs some work -- to say the least!
Rachel Axon. This will be her second Olympics. Sochi was her first. She will focus on gymnastics but is also our main Olympics reporter and will cover IOC, USOC and local organizing committee issues. Sochi, she said, “was a heck of a good way to start as freeskiing and snowboarding (my beat) accounted for 11 of 28 U.S. medals. Somehow I survived despite our venue having the consensus worst food, which included curd constituted differently each day.”
Christine Brennan (Columnist). This is her 17th Olympics. She will write general columns, but will be spending quite a bit of time at swimming. “I'll never forget watching the great Greg Louganis hit his head on the board during a preliminary event in Seoul in 1988. He courageously came back 30 minutes later with a patch on his head and nailed the next dive. All this drama happened in the middle of the night back in the United States, and years before we had the internet, so I had to wait almost a day to get a story on this unforgettable moment into the newspaper.”
Alan Gomez (Paste BN Reporter). This is his first Olympics. He will be covering the politics, security and Zika issues surrounding the Games. As Paste BN’s Latin America correspondent, he has reported from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Haiti and Cuba. He was last in Brazil in 2014 as the country prepared to host the World Cup.
Paul Myerberg (College football reporter). This will be his second Olympics (Sochi was his first). He will focus on track and field. “My fun fact would be that I ate the fish on each leg of my trip to and from Sochi. Or that I covered the most dominant team performance in Olympic history in the 2014 Dutch speed skaters. I guess I don’t really have a fun fact.”
Martin Rogers (General assignment reporter/columnist). Rio will be his seventh Olympics, but first for Paste BN Sports. He will focus on human interest features and columns, as well as the wider social and political issues surrounding the Games. He also will be a leader in video.
Jeff Zillgitt (NBA reporter). This will be his seventh Olympics. He will focus on men’s and women’s basketball in Rio. “I have been to a museum in every country while covering the Olympics. Always appreciate the passion of the German fans at the bobsled track and the Lithuanian fans at the basketball venue. Love telling stories about those who win a medal and those who don’t.”
ARIZONA REPUBLIC
Jeff Metcalfe. Rio will be his 13th Olympics. His focus will be gymnastics and track and some swimming and local stories for Gannett properties. “When I was first out of college, I worked in Colorado Springs when the U.S. Olympic Committee moved its headquarters there in 1978. I began covering USOC issues/events at that time including a meeting to formally decide to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics that was made in Colorado Springs. I covered my first Olympics in 1984, while still working in Colorado Springs. I have extensively covered track and gymnastics, including Arizonan Kerri Strug’s team gold medal-clinching vault in 1996.”
INDIANAPOLIS STAR
David Woods. This will be his 8th Olympics. His focus will be on track and field, swimming and diving and local stories for Gannett properties. A fun fact: He fell asleep on a media shuttle while covering modern pentathlon at Athens in 2004. He had slept 90 minutes the night before after filing a story on the women’s soccer gold-medal game. Another fun fact: He was at Michael Phelps’ first post-Olympic final news conference at Sydney in 2000. He sat with his coach, Bob Bowman, and gold medalist Tom Malchow after placing fifth in the 200-meter butterfly. Phelps barely spoke.