✈ You know the walls of the Olympic bubble are closing in on everyone when the Team USA curlers show up at your hotel lobby bar to hang out. They finished their competition and there isn’t any alcohol in the athlete’s village, so they searched for the best place to celebrate the end of their Beijing journey and wound up here. They seem like a ton of fun and I think they liked our hotel, because they showed up again the next night for dinner and drinks.
I’ve spent the weekend packing up while doing some final reports for NBC 7. I walked upstairs in the International Broadcast Center (IBC) to the souvenir shop to see if there were any last minute things I could grab for folks back home, but the line was longer than it has been for the entire winter games.
People are waiting six hours in line now for this stuffed panda mascot and it doesn’t appear the excitement will die down by the time I leave.
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Giant cargo crates now line the halls of the IBC and everything from monitors, to medicine, to lights are getting loaded up for a trip back home. I have one case with some equipment that will be on a sea shipment home. When I asked when it is expected to arrive in the US, I was told “probably sometime this summer.”
The team I’m part of here at the Olympics, which includes crews from several large TV news markets across the US, is the smallest group of any of the seven Olympics I’ve covered. We’ve gotten to know each other pretty well.
I asked everyone to wear their NBC Beijing vests for a “team photo” and we got clearance to go inside the main NBC Sports Olympics set where Mike Tirico did his initial broadcasts at the start of the games. A studio crew member said he was glad it was getting some use, even though it was just for a quick photo. It has been a pleasure to work alongside some great talent and everyone is very friendly and down to earth.
We have some final COVID testing and paperwork to get done in order to leave China and reenter the US, but it’s nothing like the logistical mountain we climbed in order to enter the country last month. A bus will be picking me up around 4 a.m. Tuesday (which is around noon Monday in San Diego) and I’ll begin the trip home. I entered these games with such a low bar and all of the concerns of what would happen in the event of a positive COVID test. A lot of people who were supposed to come and report on these games didn’t. I understood their reasoning at the time, but knowing what I know now, I’m glad I made the trip.
In the end this was a trip defined by barriers, the ones we overcame to get here, the fences that contained us, and even a “great” one I never did get to see. There were barriers broken by athletes like Erin Jackson and ones that looked more like ceilings for sunsetting greats like Shaun White. All in all, I’ve enjoyed my time in this bubble, but the barrier has run its course. Now it’s time to break out with a plane ticket home.
NBC 7's Steven Luke is in Beijing, China to bring us the latest updates from the 2022 Winter Olympics. Click here to follow his journey, day-by-day
