In a previous life, I was a sports journalist, an occupation that took me to many of the biggest sporting events in the United States. As a reporter and later, an editor, I attended the Masters Golf Tournament, the Kentucky Derby, the Super Bowl, three college football championship games, the NCAA Final Four, the World Series and innumerable professional and college sporting events that people typically pay good money to see.

Twelve years ago, I attended my first and only Olympic Games — the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. At the time, I was a sports editor in Arizona and was dispatched to the Olympic Games to serves as bureau chief for Freedom Newspaper’s Olympic coverage team, which consisted of 12 reporters, three columnists and six photographers from the various newspapers owned by the Freedom chain. The largest of the papers was the Orange County Register. Another of the newspapers, the Colorado Springs Gazette, was home to the U.S. Olympic training facility.

My primary job was determine which reporters would be sent to cover the events. The Orange County staffers naturally assumed they would be given their pick of the most popular events by virtue of the fact that they worked at, by far, the largest and most prestigious newspaper in the chain. The Gazette folks, meanwhile, assumed they would get their pick by virtue of their expertise — they covered Olympics sports on an every-day basis and knew the athletes, coaches and staffs on a first-name basis.

Everybody wanted to cover figure skating, naturally. Hockey was a plum assignment, too. The Orange County Register had a particular interest in short-track speed skating, a sport I didn’t even know existed a month before the game. The Register had been following a budding superstar in the sport, a southern California kid named Apollo Ohno. The Gazette reporters didn’t have a problem with the Register reporters grabbing up all the short-track speed skating assignments. That was an exception, though. The Gazette and Register reporters fought and bickered over assignments on a daily basis.

As you might suspect, my job required no small amount of diplomatic skills. It also required thick skin. Every time I looked up, an unhappy reporter would be there to protest his assignment.

Another challenge was figuring out which of the events we would cover at all. Once the games started, there were more events than reporters and many events were held at the same time in various venues from Salt Lake to Ogden to Park City to Deer Valley.

The other part of the my job was figuring out what to do with the two news reporters that were assigned to me. The idea of sending news reporters to Salt Lake City emerged from the very serious concerns over a terrorist attack on the games. We wanted veteran news reporters on the scene in the event of a tragedy. Remember: These games were held just six months after 9/11 and the worries over another a terrorist attack were palpable.

The security was so tight that it took spectators as much as three hours to get through the security checkpoints at the venues. Reporters were searched so thoroughly that even the caps of ink pens had to be removed for inspection. Every journalist was required to have a passport, even U.S. journalists. That’s right: I had to have a passport to travel from Arizona to Utah.

When I wasn’t busy distributing unhappy reporters to the various events and making up stories for the two news reporters to cover ­ — one news reporter became obsessed about the sex traffic in Mormon-dominated Salt Lake City — I spent hours talking to editors about what sort of coverage they wanted, putting a special emphasis on making sure that all of the “hometown” athletes got some coverage. That was tricky, too. One guy on a four-man bobsled team that isn’t expected to be in the hunt for a medal would be easy to ignore. Unless of course, that guy was from “back home.” With 14 newspapers scattered all over the country, there was always some obscure athlete whose exploits at the game were of vital interest the readers “back home.”

Even my paper had a “local” at the games, a former women’s shot-putter whose job on the bobsled team was to get the bobsled going really fast and then hop in and hang on.

The days were long. I arrived at the media center at 8 a.m. and usually didn’t back to the hotel until midnight. I was in Salt Lake City for 24 days.

Ironically, I saw very little of the Olympic Games I was actually assigned to be a part of.

Fortunately, I was able to get away and attend a few events — Deer Valley for the women’s downhill, Peaks Ice Arena for a hockey game, Utah Olympic Park for luge. I also made it all the way up to Ogden to see if curling is as boring in person as it is on TV. It is. Friday Night bingo at the American Legion Hall is more exciting, as far as I am concerned.

All in all, my experience at the Olympics was a long, tedious ordeal interrupted by occasional moments of fun.

I worked with some wonderfully talented journalists and managed to stay on speaking terms with all of them.

My bosses at Freedom seemed pleased, too, so I figure it turned out pretty well.

But I have no desire to be in Sochi.

I’d rather watch it on TV and not have to worry about making a reporter cover the biathlon when he really wanted to cover hockey.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].

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