Last month when a veritable blizzard hit Hampton Roads, Debbie White dug to the back of her closet and pulled out a pair of Adidas moon boots to “brave the conditions.” There’s a great story behind how she acquired those boots, a story that has come back into focus now that the Sochi Winter Olympics are steaming along.
Back in 1984, before the U.S. Olympic Committee cultivated its own in-house communications team, White was one of four college sports information directors recruited to serve the Olympic cause in Sarajevo. White, who today is senior associate athletic director for external operations at Old Dominion University, had essentially tried out for the part during two Olympic Sports Festivals. She was the only female on the staff that went to what is now Bosnia on the world map.
Thirty years ago, it was Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, and it was very much a communist state. And 30 years ago, Debbie “Harmison” didn’t give a lot of thought to her foot ware for the 4,800-mile journey.
“The U.S. Olympic Committee gave me a 36-piece wardrobe that included cowboy boots,” White said. “But I couldn’t wear the cowboy boots for the skiing events. And my assignment was the U.S. ski team.”
White had the downhill skiers, the ski jumpers, the cross country skiers and the biathletes, those crazy folk who ski along for a while, then stop and shoot stuff.
White had brought with her a pair of L.L. Bean boots with little-to-no insulation. She quickly discovered those “mud-puddle boots” weren’t going to cut a tough winter in the mountains around Sarajevo. In fact, she soon feared that any cutting done would be the cutting off of her toes from frostbite if she didn’t do something, and quick.
Fortunately, she had befriended an ABC cameraman. As they hung out in the ABC crew’s doublewide at the bottom of the mountain, White spotted a pair of snow boots on the wall. Actually, there were many pairs, but the pair she eyed was her size. A deal was cut. White would trade her Team USA cowboy hat for the boots. She couldn’t agree to the barter fast enough.
“I was a kid from Virginia who took care of a basketball team back home,” White says now. Looking back, the mistake she made with the L.L. Bean boots was minor in comparison to some of the miscues of those Olympic Games, like the moment the Olympic flag was unfurled at the opening ceremony hanging upside down.
Hey, mistakes happen.
So White got her boots. And then she went about experiencing the thrill of a lifetime, which the Olympics are supposed to be. That year, the U.S. contingent won four gold medals and four silvers. White was the contact person for three of those gold medalists: downhill skier Bill Johnson, giant slalom skier Phil Mahre and women’s giant slalom skier Debbie Armstrong.
The only other gold medalist the U.S. mustered that year was men’s figure skater Scott Hamilton. White even had two silver medalists in her midst: Phil’s brother Steve Mahre and women’s giant slalom’s Christin Cooper.
White was at the center of the world, if but for a moment. And she essentially had polar opposites to deal with, the humble-to-a-fault Mahre brothers and the egocentric braggart that Bill Johnson was.
For White, Johnson was the one who stood out. He had brashly predicted victory prior to the event, even though the Olympic downhill to that point had been dominated by skiers from the Alps. In fact, no one outside the Alps countries had ever won and Johnson was a nobody.
Then Johnson won by 0.27 seconds over Switzerland’s Peter Muller. White remembers being at the bottom of the hill, trying to answer the media requests of the world, all at once.
“People needed to make their international deadlines and there I was, holding about 30 microphones and leaning over crime tape at the bottom of the hill while Bill Johnson answered questions,” White said. “We finally got Bill into a doublewide for a more conventional post-race press conference.”
Those 1984 Winter Olympics featured Katarina Witt, Hamilton and the ice dancing duo of Torvill and Dean, who all performed at the Zetra Ice Hall in downtown Sarajevo.
White, meanwhile, was traveling mostly on bus to Igman, Bjelasnica and Jahorina, outposts up the sides of mountains. There was, however, the one day when she was forced to take a cab that “cost me a fortune.”
“I missed the bus and the cab took me to the top of the mountain, because security was so heavy at the bottom that the cab couldn’t get in,” she said. “So I had to ride the ski lift down the mountain. I didn’t even know how to get on the ski lift.”
Her ride down the hill was “harrowing.” So was the Sarajevo food. She remembers ordering a pizza and hoping to find some Americanized love in a slice. But the pizza was topped with fried eggs. And local coffee poured out at the speed of syrup. White lost seven pounds during that Olympics, and she’s not one with seven pounds to lose. She made it through on bread and tea and M&Ms, the latter supplied by the ABC TV folks who had a stash on hand.
She remembers the Sarajevo villagers, forced by a communist state to put aside their day jobs for three weeks while the world came to town. The young man directing traffic near her accommodations in the Olympic Village was “a dentist.”
She ticked off her other great memories:
· Sitting below Jim MaKay’s booth as he announced the opening ceremonies;
· Hanging out with commentator Keith Jackson;
· The soldiers armed with machine guns at every corner;
· The hand-knitted sweater she still owns with the Olympic rings knitted into it.
But mostly, she remembered the overwhelming feeling she had when her own national anthem was played in a communist state. “It still gives me chill bumps when I think about it,” she said.
Quite frankly, no other person on hand may have heard the United States national anthem played that year as many times as White did. She had three aces at her disposal. By U.S. standards, the 1984 Winter Games proved to be a thin take of medals.
White, however, had a rich experience, in many ways. The idea of using college SIDs as staffers expired shortly thereafter. Yet for those three weeks White cultivated contacts with USA Today, the Associated Press and ABC TV that live on today, 30 years later.
White might not have the cowboy hat that was the outfit standard for Team USA in Sarajevo, but she still has 10 working toes that didn’t freeze off because of those boots she traded for.
And she still has those boots.