Number Two (19 page)

O
n our first full day in Russia, we woke up late after consuming one too many draft beers at the lobby bar of our hotel, La Terrassa. A young man named Artem had been serving them up for us. He didn't speak English, so we began communicating using the power of Google Translate, which I am convinced would have prevented most wars had it been introduced centuries ago. The thrill of typing in English and having it magically appear in Russian, then handing it over to Artem, who instantly smiled in recognition, was a feeling of joy and relief I hadn't experienced in some time. Technology is truly wonderful! I mean, how else would I get my beer on? And in addition to pulling a mean pint, Artem and the other guys behind the bar could whip up a pretty mean cappuccino too. We're talking Seattle indie coffeehouse quality here.

Visiting the Olympic Park for the first time, I was impressed
with what the Russians had accomplished. The entire concept was very clear: Keep all the venues as close as possible. The Olympic Park had been built on a plot of land that was basically abandoned before the Olympics, giving the organizers a chance to put everything within walking distance.

Our first stop that day was Canada Olympic House—a building where the athletes and their families could gather and enjoy drinks and food and familiar Canadian treats like Caramilk Bars and ketchup chips, all in a comfortable setting. It was also home to the offices for the Canadian Olympic Committee and a small store where you could purchase official merchandise. Unlike London, where the various Olympic houses were scattered all over that massive city, in Sochi almost all the houses were inside the Olympic Park itself. The lone exception was Holland House, fully sponsored by Heineken and as usual the biggest party in town. They decided to set up shop behind one of the bigger (and nicer) hotels so they could stay open later and have a bit more real estate. It was a brilliant concept. The Dutch national broadcaster, Olympic House, and the athletes' lounge were all part of the same complex, so when someone like star speed skater Sven Kramer won a medal they could interview him and get him drunk in one comfortable setting.

Perhaps it was a coincidence, but Canada Olympic House and USA Olympic House were situated right beside each other. The Canadian house was a two-story affair and towered over the more austere, bungalow-like USA House, and the differences carried over inside. Soon after we arrived I went with U.S. Olympic figure skater Michelle Kwan, who'd been hired by Fox to work as a commentator during the Games, to learn about the U.S. bobsled team's new sled, designed by BMW. The coaches of the men's and women's teams gave us a bit of instruction, and then we sardined ourselves
into the sled. Poor Michelle probably wished she had never agreed to the exercise. Luckily, we were on dry land or we probably would have both been seriously injured. After the demo we wandered around the restaurant/lounge area and I commented on how quiet and buttoned up things seemed to be. Even when the place was packed, as it was when we stopped by with another newly hired Fox commentator a few days later—former U.S. Olympic hockey player and NHL Hall of Famer Chris Chelios—it still had the air of a quiet afternoon dinner party at the Barefoot Contessa's house.

Meanwhile, next door at Canada House, the decidedly cozier confines on the main floor gave the place a more raucous party atmosphere, like a small pub in Ontario cottage country but with slightly better furniture and Canadian Olympians wandering around. In a way we felt a bit conflicted about being there—like we were taking advantage of the situation. We had no reason or right to walk through the door, if I'm being honest. We were broadcasting for an American audience who on the whole probably had very little idea who Tessa Virtue or Scott Moir was. We felt a little sheepish when we'd wander up to the place, walk in, and ask for a few guest passes so we could show some of our friends from Fox what Canadian hospitality was all about.

The first time we stopped by Canada Olympic House the Russian security guard outside eyed me up like I was coming to return Bieber to the Canadians. He looked like a younger Jean Reno, but after our initial, somewhat tension-filled first meeting, he seemed to warm up to me. Suddenly, I was breezing right past him on my way to the front desk, where I was likely bringing in more Americans to see the place and enjoy a free pint of Miller Genuine Draft. (The Molson Canadian, much like our Fox Olympic winter jackets, had been “held up” at customs. That's not a joke. Fox had ordered about fifty beautiful winter jackets for our entire crew, and one of
our senior executives spent much of the first week negotiating with customs to get them back. The price continued to go up and up until he abandoned the idea of retrieving them altogether.)

One thing that was
not
held up in customs was the Molson Canadian beer fridge, a genius bit of marketing by the Molson Coors group. A beer fridge was placed at the back of the Canada Olympic House near the bar, and the only way to open it was by using your Canadian passport, which you carefully slid into a slot in the front. You would hear a “click” and presto! Free beer!

We brought along one of our web producers to demonstrate that a U.S. passport would not work while we gleefully cracked the fridge with our Canadian credentials. The Molson Canadian PR staff on site were delighted that we stopped by, and they retweeted the web video we put together about the fridge. We decided to invite the Molson PR staff back to La Terrassa later that evening for some drinks and socializing and perhaps a few leftover breakfast potatoes from the morning buffet. Like everyone who stopped by “the Frat House,” we led the team around our hotel for a tour, which included climbing all five flights to the top floor where we shot our segments for
Fox Sports Live
every night.

Leaning over the balcony as we admired the Olympic Park across the street that night, I couldn't help but notice what might best be described as a “commotion” about a block away directly in front of an apartment building where several of our staff had been put up during the Games—including our three Russian makeup artists. A massive crowd had gathered and an ambulance was on the scene.

“That doesn't look good,” said Tonia, one of the Molson PR staff, who was just about to celebrate her birthday and probably wished she was anywhere else but this bizarre Russian hotel at the moment.

Indeed, it did not look good at all. An ambulance called in around one in the morning in the middle of Adler could not mean good things. We went back to the lobby to get the Molson girls some drinks. Our new friend, Fox NFL reporter turned Fox figure skating reporter Peter Schrager, kept saying to anyone who would listen that there was a serious situation happening just down the street and perhaps we should be concerned about it—or at least for the safety of
our
crew. From our vantage point, it seemed like there was a serious discussion happening among the Fox Network heavy hitters who were running the show on our end, but no immediate danger.
Must have been a heart attack or something like that
, I thought to myself, and gave it little more thought as the nighttime turned into daytime once again on our Sochi sojourn.

Even though I had shut things down at the usual time—around five in the morning—I found myself unable to sleep at 9:00 a.m. and decided to join the gang that went over to the gym and spa at the nearby Radisson Blu Hotel, which we were allowed access to thanks to a couple of our senior Fox production people. I threw on a T-shirt and jeans, chucked a pair of swim trunks into my official Sochi 2014 backpack, provided compliments of the local organizing committee, and plodded downstairs to the lobby to see who was waiting for Kostya, our driver and all-around great guy. One of Artem's cappuccinos steadied my nerves a bit, and I noticed our Russia-based producers (I made the mistake of introducing them as our “translators” once and they didn't speak to me for two days), Irina and Dasha, sitting in the lobby looking unusually forlorn. I skipped over to them.

“Good morning, ladies,” I said with a grin. My full smile was not yet returned.

“Morning,” said Irina flatly.

“What's wrong? What's going on?” I asked.

She looked around, then stared straight into my eyes.

“A woman died last night.”

“Huh?”

“Crowd outside the apartment down the street. Last night. They were surrounding woman who fell off balcony and died.”

What a shocking bit of news to get on just four hours of barely sober sleep.

Hours later, the entire staff, almost forty of us, was summoned to the fourth-floor studios for a debriefing, henceforth known somewhat insensitively as “the Murder Meeting.” Jeff Husvar, a Fox executive VP, who was running the operation, struck a sombre tone as he explained the situation. It turned out the apartment across from the one Fox was using for its employees was being rented out to several migrant workers who were responsible for building and maintaining the Olympic venues. The apartments in the building were intended for a family of four but were likely housing as many as twenty-five men—
each
—throughout the course of the Games. On the previous night, three men were outside on the top-floor balcony when an argument broke out. A woman intervened to break up the argument and somehow
accidentally
tumbled over the edge of the balcony to her death.

Uh huh.

Regardless of what we thought about the story, this was the company line and little could be done about it now. The main concern going forward was obviously security. A woman had fallen to her death under suspicious circumstances directly across the street from our accommodation. It was determined that no one staying in those apartments would be allowed to walk back and forth to the studios at La Terrassa without being accompanied by one of our
security team, who were usually just hanging around the lobby and would likely welcome the opportunity to go for a little walk anyway. After the meeting was over I returned to the lobby to sit down and speak with Robert Lusetich, our Fox
golf
reporter and columnist who was given the
snowboarding
beat in Sochi. (I'll pause to allow you to read that sentence again.) Robert and I were discussing the events of the previous evening, when Natasha, one of our beautiful Russian makeup artists, sauntered through the door all by herself. Not a single person accompanied her on her walk from the apartment—the same apartment where a woman fell to her death not twenty-four hours prior.

“New plan is working pretty well,” said Robert.

Partway through our stay in Sochi, we decided to take a trip up to Rosa Khutor Mountain Village to see if we could find some interesting material for a story. Predictably, after getting dropped off, our first stop was the McDonald's for a little sustenance. I should mention that over the course of my fourteen or so days in Sochi I ate at McDonald's approximately fifteen times. I hated becoming one of those Western tourists who didn't bother trying the local cuisine because it was foreign to them. That wasn't the reason we made the trek to McD's every day. The real reason was that La Terrassa
was beginning to resemble a really bad all-inclusive resort, and we couldn't handle the smell coming out of the kitchen anymore. The first day or so we were pleasantly surprised: “This food isn't bad!” But then we realized the exact same food would be placed in front of us every single day like we were at a medium-security prison. Once the cook in the kitchen had determined a few mostly Western dishes seemed to be popular with our group, she just kept cranking out those same dishes over and over again, rather than
serving up something she was probably more familiar with preparing. The food at the restaurants around Sochi wasn't much better. So McDonald's became a daily staple. Between the Big Macs and the vodka, Dan and I returned from Russia carrying approximately fifty extra pounds.

Each.

Back in the mountain cluster, we wandered around the mile-long stretch of hotels, restaurants, and shops that was finished, oh, about six or seven minutes before we showed up. The whole place was really beautiful but still had the distinct look and feel of a theme-park version of a mountain ski village. All I could think the whole time we were there was
Who will come here to ski?
North Americans? It's unlikely that the ones with enough scratch to put together a transcontinental ski trip would make it past the Alps. It's not as if you could fly directly into Sochi or anything. The whole venture just didn't seem like it was worth the trouble. Native Russians? Maybe, but how many of them had the money to make the trek down to Sochi? The ones I talked to wanted to go to New York or the Caribbean, not spend their hard-earned holiday dollars on a ski trip in their own backyard. The question came up again and again everywhere we went in Sochi: What would this place look like in ten years? The problem was no one seemed willing to come back here in ten years' time to find out.

After unsuccessfully trying to put together some sort of “story” in which Dan and I checked out an open-air cafeteria where you were served by Cossacks and Russian women in peasant skirts and headdresses, we abandoned the idea of accomplishing anything constructive and made our way to the Rosa Khutor Extreme Park, a place I could not say the name of without either bursting into laughter or coming up with my own theme song for the place:

DON'T GO OUT ON A LARK . . .

JUST HIT THE ROSA KHUTOR EXTREME PARK!

The lyrics were rudimentary but the sentiment was there.

We met up with Chris Chelios and Andy Finch at the halfpipe event. Andy was a professional snowboarder who competed in the first ever Olympic halfpipe in Turin, Italy, back in 2006. He was the epitome of a surfer dude who grew up in California and spoke in a long, slow drawl. He was a wonderful guy, partial to wearing flip-flops everywhere, and at one point during the Games decided to complete the trifecta of snowboarding, surfing, and skateboarding in the same day—all of which he was able to capture on tape via a GoPro camera attached to his helmet. He also amazed us on the final day of the Games when he retired to his hotel room and came back with a violin, which he proceeded to play for us
by ear
. Any song we would play on our laptops Andy would listen to for a second and then play note for note right in front of us—the result of lessons taken from age six to eighteen. Quite a party trick. He and Chelios bonded early in the Games, sort of an opposites-attract-via-mutual-respect type of thing. Chelly was a Malibu resident who had become good friends with big-wave surfer Laird Hamilton, and he and Andy got along great. Andy would quietly explain the minute details of snowboarding to Chris, and then when we attended Olympic hockey games I'd hear Chris explaining line changes and power plays to Andy.