Helping women and minorities into newsrooms since 1993
Helping women and minorities into newsrooms since 1993
Although Marcus Thompson is known to most American sports fans as one of the most plugged-in NBA reporters in the U.S., he will be taking a giant leap out of his comfort zone this summer as he focuses roughly 90 percent of his coverage on track and field.
Does this worry Thompson? If you think the answer is yes, then you don’t know Marcus very well. He’s pumped for doing something different, and learning as he goes.
But don’t get the wrong idea. Thompson’s favorite Olympic moment is from track and field competition. But it’s not about winning or losing, which is one reason why
Thompson is so moved by it. It was about Derek Redmond, the athlete, and his father. Redmond pulled his hamstring running the 400 meters in the 1992 Summer Olympics, and though he still had 200-plus meters to go, he was determined to finish the race. And so it was that, after the other runners had already finished, the cameras found.
Redmond, limping along in pain.
But that wasn’t the end of the story. “Out of nowhere, as Redmond rounded the final turn, his father ran onto the track to help him,” Thompson recalled. “And Redmond burst into tears on his father’s shoulder.”
Thompson sees the Paris Summer Games as a test—not for the athletes so much as for himself.
“When all of the context and layers merge into something special, I look forward to testing myself to write worthy of that on a sport I don’t know that well, in a country I’ve never been to, at an event I’ve never experienced,” he said.
Thompson, a member of SJI’s Class of 1998, will be covering his first Olympics. If he has any questions, he need look no further than some of his SJI classmates and extended family. Rachel Bachman, senior sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal and an SJI alum from the program's second class in 1994, will be covering her eighth Olympics.
“I’ve covered every Summer and Winter Games since 20010. The first I covered for The Oregonian, the others for the WSJ,” she said.
Asked what she was looking forward to the most at these Games, she didn’t hesitate.
“Normal Olympics,” Bachman said, recalling that both the Tokyo Games and the Beijing Games were held during the pandemic and allowed very few fans. Reporters’
movements were also restricted, with media on separate buses from locals. “It was a pretty grim experience,” she said.
For Bachman, it wasn’t hard to come up with a favorite Olympic memory. “In 2010 I remember a Canadian skier winning the nation’s first gold medal at the Vancouver
Games and taking a call from the prime minister later, “right at the bottom of the hill.”
This will be SJI alum Chris Bumbaca’s third Olympics, after also helping to cover the Tokyo and Beijing Games. He can’t think of a better opening assignment than the one he has from USA Today.
“I’m spending the first week on soccer coverage—I’ll be in Marseilles on a Wednesday, Nice on a Thursday and return to Paris Friday for the opening ceremony,” Bumbaca said. “Talk about a heck of a life.”