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Life in the Village
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| Jimbo (left) and Henni Haley, both former Olympians, said the Olympic Village was the place to be during the 1992 games in Barcelona. Jimbo is from Lake City and lives here with Henni and their two children. JASON MATTHEW WALKER/Lake City Reporter |
Lake City Olympians say Olympic Village best part of games.
By CHRIS WHITE
cwhite@lakecityreporter.com
Most of the 200,000-plus fans visiting China for this month’s Olympic Games in Beijing have already arrived and each is likely to wander the massive city of nearly 15 million people awed by the sheer size of the event, influenced by the cultures and just plain star struck around some of the greatest athletes on the planet.
Lake City’s Jimbo Haley had a pretty similar experience in 1992 — even though he was on the inside looking out.
Jimbo made the 1992 U.S. men’s modern pentathlon team and competed in Barcelona. It was an almost surreal experience to finally be living out one of his dreams, but the real show was everywhere else but at the venues, Jimbo said.
“It was amazing to look around and see all these athletes you look up to,” Jimbo said. “It started before we even got there.”
Most of the American athletes took flights to Spain together, and Jimbo shared the trip with several high-profile athletes, including Oscar De La Hoya.
“People were all walking around and you’d look at someone and say, wow, there’s so-and-so,” Jimbo said. “And there were people walking around looking at you, too,
saying, wow, check out who it is.”
At home in the Village
Every city lucky enough to host the Olympics goes overboard
to impress the media and the
athletes.
The Chinese government built luxurious high-rise apartments for the 16,000 athletes and coaches planning to stay there, and each will go for an estimated $1 million after they leave, according to media reports on the scale of the project.
Barcelona was no different. The Olympic Village played host to nearly 10,000 athletes from
169 countries, and the accommodations were more than comfortable.
“We really had these condo-like places we were staying,” Jimbo said. “They were really nice and you were right there looking at the Mediterranean.”
It was a neighborhood full of celebrities, and everyone was a little bit dazed by the experience.
“Our neighbor was Lance Armstrong and I thought that was just amazing because I thought he was the man,” Jimbo said. “He was really cool and everyone there just really appreciated everyone else.”
The only people to stay outside of the Olympic Village, though, might have been the most famous. The U.S. men’s basketball team — The Dream Team — found their own accommodations, which tarnished their image for many of the other athletes, Jimbo said.
But Charles Barkley watched the games in the lounge areas with
fellow athletes and even became protective of his compatriots, threatening intrusive photographers.
“(Barkley) was just like you see him on TV,” Jimbo said. “He was a good guy, and he got right up in the cameras to get them out of there.”
The rest of the team, however, did little to discourage the image when they were reprimanded for talking trash to opponents and accused of treating the trip as a vacation, and avoiding the media whenever they could.
Good eats
Village life offered the most rewarding experience of the entire trip, Jimbo said, and athletes would gather in the cafeteria, one of the only places off-limits to the media.
“There were some cool places there, but the
cafeteria was the best because everyone could just relax,” Jimbo said.
And everyone was on a level playing field with world champions there.
Jimbo said he sat down for a meal next to tennis legend Jimmy Connors, and the two connected over their country of origin and nicknames.
“I just asked if I could sit there and he said sure and we struck up a conversation,” Jimbo said. “I told him my name was Jimbo and he told me all of his family called him that, too.”
And when some fellow athletes asked the former world champion if they could take a picture of him, he refused to be singled out.
“When they told him they wanted a picture, he told them, no, you can’t have a picture of me. You have to take a picture of all us and everyone that was right there got in the
picture,” Jimbo said.
“That’s what it was like being there. Everyone was so close.”
There may have been another close encounter that did not stick quite as well. According to a friend, Jimbo once shared a table with a Hungarian gymnast named Henni Onodi. While the encounter was lost in the mix of memories, Jimbo and Onodi would later marry after meeting through mutual friends and a connection to the U.S. pentathlon training center in San Antonio, Texas.
“His friend says we sat together, but he doesn’t remember it,” Henni said. “But really we don’t know if it’s true or not.”
Jimbo would finish his event 25th overall and the American team would fall just over 100 points shy of a medal in fourth place.
His future wife would win gold in the vault and take
silver in the floor exercise, and would rejoin the Hungarian team for the 1996 games in Atlanta, where the team finished ninth overall and Henni failed to repeat.
While many professional athletes have gained reputations as party animals, the games were far removed from something like an
all-star break in Las Vegas.
“People partied a little, but not anything wild like a lot of people might expect,” Jimbo said. “A lot of people would just go out to the bars after their events were over, and everyone was just kind of hanging out with everyone else.”
Under pressure
According to Jimbo, the hardest part of being an Olympian was becoming one. Once an athlete made it through the intense qualifying rounds, the hard part was usually over.
“That hurdle is over with and you just relax a little,” he said. “It’s easy after that.”
But while few Americans regularly follow the pentathlon, much of the world shares a fascination with gymnastics.
In Hungary, Olympic scouts routinely find
talent at a young age, and Henni was selected to begin
training for a possible career as a gymnast at 4 when her teachers suggested she give the sport a try for the visiting representatives. Her parents were asked if they wanted to allow their daughter to train, and Henni was excited to begin.
She joined the junior national team and climbed the ranks to the senior team. When the 1978 Olympics went to Seoul, South Korea, she was too young, but made the trip to Barcelona as an 18-year-old member of the team. And with big expectations.
“I was really the only gymnast from Hungary who could have won a gold medal, so there was a lot of pressure from the country on me,” Henni said. “I just had to think about it like another competition. Just do your best and don’t fall.”
When she walked away with a pair of medals, the pressures made the
celebration back in the Olympic Village almost anticlimactic.
“They put the medal on you and then the lights go off and they say, OK, go home, you’re done,” Henni said. “Then the night I went back to my room, all of my friends had already gone out and I was all by myself. I didn’t know what to do. Should I drink some champagne or what? I didn’t know.”
If the press was busy
covering the Olympic Village, it was swarming over medal winners.
Jimbo met President George Bush in a ceremony at the White House and returned to Lake City to Jimbo Haley Appreciation Day.
Henni returned to Hungary where she met with the Hungarian president and was again overwhelmed when she was presented to the press with Hungarian swimmer Krisztina Egerszegi, who won three gold medals in 1992 and was a sort of national sports hero.
“They took pictures of me with her and I couldn’t believe people put me next to her,” Henni said. “I only had one gold medal, and she had three.”
Henni was no stranger to fans, either. She was greeted warmly when she returned, but some took it a little too far by bothering her with obscene phone calls.
And still today, 16 years later, a quick Internet search pulls up several fan pages full of interviews, results and photographs and people have uploaded videos of many of her competitions to YouTube.com.
“It’s kind of strange when everyone knows who you are,” Henni said of her time in the spotlight. “It can be a lot to handle.”
Training wheels turning
As a fan, an athlete and a former World Olympian Association employee, Jimbo says he’s seen few things change about Olympic Village as much as the training capabilities.
Before his trip to Barcelona, he made a visit to Colorado where he met with an Olympic nutritionist who did not travel with the teams. Now the country has several on staff, not to mention a much larger group of personal trainers and an acupuncturist.
Diet plays a big role in the day-to-day life of an Olympic athlete, and certainly a larger role than they did in 1992, according to Jimbo. Things like sugar and caffeine were avoided before taking to the range for the shooting portion of the competition, but most athletes enjoyed whatever they could in the cafeteria and made trips to the McDonald’s on site.
“I don’t think we were worried about those things as much as they are now,” he said. “But that’s what sports is. People find a way to get a small advantage and they try and try until they can get just 1 percent more out themselves.
“If it’s fixing their diet and knowing every single thing they eat, that’s just one way.”
Of course, his daily training regiment allowed Jimbo to eat nearly anything he wanted.
“I found out I was burning about 7,000 calories a day, so it really didn’t matter what I wanted to eat,” he said. “You try to eat healthy, but something bad here and there isn’t going to hurt you if you’re burning calories like that. You can have that piece of cake if you want.”
Nearly two decades removed from the Olympic team, Jimbo found another way to stay involved in the athletic development process. He attended chiropractic school at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington, Minn., and now practices out of his own clinic, Olympic Health Chiropractic in Lake City.
“I really thought it would be a good fit for me because I was an athlete and because I knew so much about what went into training and fixing your body,” he said. “I’ve been hurt and I know how the body feels and what the body does under stress. And I love working with athletes because they always take what you tell them and do it because they also know how the body is supposed to perform for them.”
Lake City’s Jimbo Haley had a pretty similar experience in 1992 — even though he was on the inside looking out.
Jimbo made the 1992 U.S. men’s modern pentathlon team and competed in Barcelona. It was an almost surreal experience to finally be living out one of his dreams, but the real show was everywhere else but at the venues, Jimbo said.
“It was amazing to look around and see all these athletes you look up to,” Jimbo said. “It started before we even got there.”
Most of the American athletes took flights to Spain together, and Jimbo shared the trip with several high-profile athletes, including Oscar De La Hoya.
“People were all walking around and you’d look at someone and say, wow, there’s so-and-so,” Jimbo said. “And there were people walking around looking at you, too,
saying, wow, check out who it is.”
At home in the Village
Every city lucky enough to host the Olympics goes overboard
to impress the media and the
athletes.
The Chinese government built luxurious high-rise apartments for the 16,000 athletes and coaches planning to stay there, and each will go for an estimated $1 million after they leave, according to media reports on the scale of the project.
Barcelona was no different. The Olympic Village played host to nearly 10,000 athletes from
169 countries, and the accommodations were more than comfortable.
“We really had these condo-like places we were staying,” Jimbo said. “They were really nice and you were right there looking at the Mediterranean.”
It was a neighborhood full of celebrities, and everyone was a little bit dazed by the experience.
“Our neighbor was Lance Armstrong and I thought that was just amazing because I thought he was the man,” Jimbo said. “He was really cool and everyone there just really appreciated everyone else.”
The only people to stay outside of the Olympic Village, though, might have been the most famous. The U.S. men’s basketball team — The Dream Team — found their own accommodations, which tarnished their image for many of the other athletes, Jimbo said.
But Charles Barkley watched the games in the lounge areas with
fellow athletes and even became protective of his compatriots, threatening intrusive photographers.
“(Barkley) was just like you see him on TV,” Jimbo said. “He was a good guy, and he got right up in the cameras to get them out of there.”
The rest of the team, however, did little to discourage the image when they were reprimanded for talking trash to opponents and accused of treating the trip as a vacation, and avoiding the media whenever they could.
Good eats
Village life offered the most rewarding experience of the entire trip, Jimbo said, and athletes would gather in the cafeteria, one of the only places off-limits to the media.
“There were some cool places there, but the
cafeteria was the best because everyone could just relax,” Jimbo said.
And everyone was on a level playing field with world champions there.
Jimbo said he sat down for a meal next to tennis legend Jimmy Connors, and the two connected over their country of origin and nicknames.
“I just asked if I could sit there and he said sure and we struck up a conversation,” Jimbo said. “I told him my name was Jimbo and he told me all of his family called him that, too.”
And when some fellow athletes asked the former world champion if they could take a picture of him, he refused to be singled out.
“When they told him they wanted a picture, he told them, no, you can’t have a picture of me. You have to take a picture of all us and everyone that was right there got in the
picture,” Jimbo said.
“That’s what it was like being there. Everyone was so close.”
There may have been another close encounter that did not stick quite as well. According to a friend, Jimbo once shared a table with a Hungarian gymnast named Henni Onodi. While the encounter was lost in the mix of memories, Jimbo and Onodi would later marry after meeting through mutual friends and a connection to the U.S. pentathlon training center in San Antonio, Texas.
“His friend says we sat together, but he doesn’t remember it,” Henni said. “But really we don’t know if it’s true or not.”
Jimbo would finish his event 25th overall and the American team would fall just over 100 points shy of a medal in fourth place.
His future wife would win gold in the vault and take
silver in the floor exercise, and would rejoin the Hungarian team for the 1996 games in Atlanta, where the team finished ninth overall and Henni failed to repeat.
While many professional athletes have gained reputations as party animals, the games were far removed from something like an
all-star break in Las Vegas.
“People partied a little, but not anything wild like a lot of people might expect,” Jimbo said. “A lot of people would just go out to the bars after their events were over, and everyone was just kind of hanging out with everyone else.”
Under pressure
According to Jimbo, the hardest part of being an Olympian was becoming one. Once an athlete made it through the intense qualifying rounds, the hard part was usually over.
“That hurdle is over with and you just relax a little,” he said. “It’s easy after that.”
But while few Americans regularly follow the pentathlon, much of the world shares a fascination with gymnastics.
In Hungary, Olympic scouts routinely find
talent at a young age, and Henni was selected to begin
training for a possible career as a gymnast at 4 when her teachers suggested she give the sport a try for the visiting representatives. Her parents were asked if they wanted to allow their daughter to train, and Henni was excited to begin.
She joined the junior national team and climbed the ranks to the senior team. When the 1978 Olympics went to Seoul, South Korea, she was too young, but made the trip to Barcelona as an 18-year-old member of the team. And with big expectations.
“I was really the only gymnast from Hungary who could have won a gold medal, so there was a lot of pressure from the country on me,” Henni said. “I just had to think about it like another competition. Just do your best and don’t fall.”
When she walked away with a pair of medals, the pressures made the
celebration back in the Olympic Village almost anticlimactic.
“They put the medal on you and then the lights go off and they say, OK, go home, you’re done,” Henni said. “Then the night I went back to my room, all of my friends had already gone out and I was all by myself. I didn’t know what to do. Should I drink some champagne or what? I didn’t know.”
If the press was busy
covering the Olympic Village, it was swarming over medal winners.
Jimbo met President George Bush in a ceremony at the White House and returned to Lake City to Jimbo Haley Appreciation Day.
Henni returned to Hungary where she met with the Hungarian president and was again overwhelmed when she was presented to the press with Hungarian swimmer Krisztina Egerszegi, who won three gold medals in 1992 and was a sort of national sports hero.
“They took pictures of me with her and I couldn’t believe people put me next to her,” Henni said. “I only had one gold medal, and she had three.”
Henni was no stranger to fans, either. She was greeted warmly when she returned, but some took it a little too far by bothering her with obscene phone calls.
And still today, 16 years later, a quick Internet search pulls up several fan pages full of interviews, results and photographs and people have uploaded videos of many of her competitions to YouTube.com.
“It’s kind of strange when everyone knows who you are,” Henni said of her time in the spotlight. “It can be a lot to handle.”
Training wheels turning
As a fan, an athlete and a former World Olympian Association employee, Jimbo says he’s seen few things change about Olympic Village as much as the training capabilities.
Before his trip to Barcelona, he made a visit to Colorado where he met with an Olympic nutritionist who did not travel with the teams. Now the country has several on staff, not to mention a much larger group of personal trainers and an acupuncturist.
Diet plays a big role in the day-to-day life of an Olympic athlete, and certainly a larger role than they did in 1992, according to Jimbo. Things like sugar and caffeine were avoided before taking to the range for the shooting portion of the competition, but most athletes enjoyed whatever they could in the cafeteria and made trips to the McDonald’s on site.
“I don’t think we were worried about those things as much as they are now,” he said. “But that’s what sports is. People find a way to get a small advantage and they try and try until they can get just 1 percent more out themselves.
“If it’s fixing their diet and knowing every single thing they eat, that’s just one way.”
Of course, his daily training regiment allowed Jimbo to eat nearly anything he wanted.
“I found out I was burning about 7,000 calories a day, so it really didn’t matter what I wanted to eat,” he said. “You try to eat healthy, but something bad here and there isn’t going to hurt you if you’re burning calories like that. You can have that piece of cake if you want.”
Nearly two decades removed from the Olympic team, Jimbo found another way to stay involved in the athletic development process. He attended chiropractic school at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington, Minn., and now practices out of his own clinic, Olympic Health Chiropractic in Lake City.
“I really thought it would be a good fit for me because I was an athlete and because I knew so much about what went into training and fixing your body,” he said. “I’ve been hurt and I know how the body feels and what the body does under stress. And I love working with athletes because they always take what you tell them and do it because they also know how the body is supposed to perform for them.”
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