ONE YEAR OUT
Olympic hopefuls focus sights on Tokyo
NEW YORK – One year from Wednesday, hundreds of U.S. Olympic athletes will parade through the new Tokyo National Stadium during the opening ceremony of the 2020 Games, waving and smiling and marveling at the fact that they’re finally there.
The moment is still 365 days away. The names and faces of those athletes have yet to be finalized, and that stadium is still under construction. But for Olympic hopefuls whose lives unfold in cycles rather than years, the oneyear-out date nevertheless marks an important milestone. They’ve prepared three years just to get to this point.
“It’s now or never,” said Erik Kynard, who won Olympic silver in the high jump in 2012. “It’s time to go.”
Nearly a dozen athletes converged in New York on Tuesday as the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee sought to drum up excitement ahead of the 2020 Games, which feel like they’re in the distant future and yet are actually not that far away at all.
The Tokyo Games will see the addition of
several new sports, including climbing, surfing and skateboarding – extreme sports intended to entice younger fans and broaden Olympic appeal.
(Olympic breakdancing might be on the way in 2024.)
And with each passing cycle, Olympic wrestler Jordan Burroughs said, the pageantry of the event only grows.
“Every Olympic Games gets bigger,” said Burroughs, who won gold in the 2012 Games in London. “(There’s) more responsibility, but more excitement. More fanfare. More sponsors. More opportunity . ...
“I think it’s the biggest spectacle in the world.”
Some, like Burroughs and Kynard, are used to the rhythm of the Olympic cycle.
But in new sports, such as climbing and skateboarding, almost every athlete is going through it for the first time. It’s the pursuit of a goal that athletes like climbing hopeful Alex Johnson never even considered until a few years ago.
“I didn’t think it’d be an Olympic sport in my competitive lifetime,” said Johnson, 30. “I thought maybe if it was, it would be after I was done.”
Now, she is one of several Americans fighting for one of the 20 sports in the women’s climbing field. The qualification process will not wrap up until early next summer.
In fact, as of early last week, only one American had officially booked her ticket to Tokyo: open-water swimmer Haley Anderson.
For most Olympic hopefuls, the next year will be defined by the tension of the qualification process – and, if successful, the hoopla that comes with it. The year-out mark simply signifies the beginning of that process, the culmination of years of training that have led to this final stretch.
“I think the significance is, ‘OK, here it comes.’ But it’s not something you begin to prepare for now,” Burroughs said. “This has been a three-year commitment, for me, to arrive at this point. Now, it’s just putting up the finishing touches on the preparation for everything that I needed to do.”