Flashes of Panic

It’s too easy for me to look at a chunk of work and let the anticipation paralyze me.

Saturday night I knew I didn’t have time to not be working, and for some reason I did all right. I sorted out a rough outline, then just dove in, and it worked. I had about 1,400 words on the page before I realized how much I’d written; I even missed an event.

For the most part, the interesting things happened in the sprints. Tariku “Kenenisa’s brother” Bekele was graceful and diplomatic in answering my question about whether he wished for interviews which didn’t mention his older world-record-holding brother (after I’d eavesdropped on the Ethiopian media grilling him about Kenenisa,) but that was about it for left-out news.

The sprinters, on the other hand… three winners came from a training group whose coach is in federal prison, and the L’Equipe reporter was a bit blunt about asking each of them how that affected their training (but they were each diplomatic and interesting in answering the question.) Liu Xiang told the Chinese media how North American meets were really difficult for him because of the time change, probably unaware that his translator, a Columbia grad student, was standing off to the side feeding me occasional quotes. (The Chinese media in general were… interesting.)

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