I’ve always enjoyed watching the athletes compete in the Olympics, and I will cheer on Team USA as our American athletes compete in their respective sports in the upcoming 2024 summer games. My favorite Olympic sports to watch would be surfing, sailing, volleyball, beach volleyball, swimming, canoeing, BMX racing, mountain biking, skateboarding, Judo, Taekwondo, diving, archery, golf, and gymnastics, but I wish all of the athletes well in the more than 40 sports.

The last time the Olympics were held in Paris was 100 years ago, in the summer of 1924.

As athletes from around the world come together in these 2024 games to perform at their best in an attempt to win a medal, this is also a time when so many nations from around the world, represented by these athletes, come together peacefully, and, hopefully, all Americans can join together and be united in watching the games and pulling for our fellow Americans who are Olympians. Whether they win a medal or not, they are to be respected for their hard work and for making it this far in competing in these games.

I enjoyed touring the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado 26 years ago, back in 1998, and, in 2011 at the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina, meeting Louis Zamperini, who competed as a distance runner in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany and was a prisoner of war during World War II and later became a Christian evangelist. At the Billy Graham Library, Zamperini signed copies of the book Unbroken, written about his life by Laura Hillenbrand.

Here locally, I remember, as the Editor of The Pickens Sentinel back in 2002, writing about two Pickens County citizens who were torch bearers on Clemson’s leg of the Olympic torch relay for the 2002 Salt Lake City, Utah Winter Olympic Games. One was Pickens’ own Milledge Cassell, and another was Jack McKenzie, with whom I had worked at the Trustee House when I was a student at Clemson and worked for the university as a student writer.

The Olympics will be televised on NBC. For a schedule and more information, visit https://www.nbcolympics.com/schedule  and https://olympics.com/en/paris-2024.

By the way, the 2026 winter Olympics will be held in Italy, and the 2028 summer games will be held in the United States – Los Angeles, California.