SEPTEMBER 13, 2010
Well, it has been an amazing week back on the road and I’m pretty pumped to finally find the time to sit down and write something. I’m smack dab in the middle of New York City, sitting out on my sister and brother-in-law’s deck nine stories over Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen district. Over the past week I’ve gone from my home in Calgary to Ithaca, New York (home of Cornell University) to Dayton, Ohio (home of Emerson Climate Technologies) and now here to New York City.
This has been another one of those weeks where I really love to get to do what I do and love to spread the message that the Olympic ideals hold true to.
As I mentioned, the week started off at home where I finally got my long awaited kitchen renovations (almost) complete! Cue Angels singing. I then boarded yet another United flight through my favorite connection hub of Chicago on my way to Ithaca via Syracuse. Everyone following? I was there for a couple days with Deloitte for a campus tour stop.
Good friend and Winter Olympic legend Apolo Ohno, and paralympian April Holmes and I met there to speak with students.
Check out the article that highlights the message we gave students.
It was a message of hard work and giving back to your community, and one that I have been having so much fun giving especially when I get the reaction I did in Cornell. Just read the last quote of the article from the school paper and you’ll see what I mean. It makes those trips so worth while when you hear the students have a reaction like that!
The following morning it was off to Dayton after a 5 a.m. shuttle took April and I to the colossal Ithaca Airport. This day I was getting to meet back up with Team Night Train for the first time in a couple months.
We were there with one of our Bobsled Federation sponsors, Emerson, doing a plant tour and giving a talk for employees. The explanation of the plant tour should be started off with the fact that I know nothing about refrigeration nor engineering!
Curt Tomasevicz, an electrical engineer himself, was eating it up… I on the other hand was completely overwhelmed. The technology and the attention to detail needed to build refrigerator compressors is amazing, but what I was even more enthralled by was the amount of love for their work shown by the employees.
The pride that they showed as they took us around their plant, their workplace, their second home, was so much fun to see. The passion that goes into their work is something that I see from Olympic athletes on a daily basis and I appreciated what they had to say so much more because of the love they showed in what they were talking about.
If everyone could be so enthusiastic about their workplace or what they do for a living we would all be so much better off in this world!
After the plant tour, Holcy, Curt, Olsen and I gave a 30 minute speech to the employees from the plant. It was so much fun reliving the Olympic Experience with the team that I accomplished my goals with I can not do a very good job putting it into words (I know, shocking!).
I’ve been traveling around the country for the past six and a half months giving my rendition of the events of and leading up to those two glorious days in late February, but this was my first opportunity to hear it in a public setting come out of the mouths of the other guys.
Just as entertaining as hearing the boys speak about ‘our’ Olympics was seeing the Emerson employees video of their interpretation of the Holcy Dance! Yes, they did their own video and everyone who danced was to be judged by Steven Holcomb himself!!!
This week’s video shows the four of us sitting in the crowd watching and discussing their Holcy Video…it was a blast! I think that’s really the thing I will miss most once the Bobsled season begins; the camaraderie of the team is something that I have grown to love so much over the years it will be difficult to separate myself from it. The Night Train especially had that the past couple years and that is really what we owe a lot of our success to.
If the team hadn’t gelled the way it did there’s really no telling what our fate would have been but you could bet USA Bobsled would have been looking to end a 66 year streak next time around at the very least…
All and all it was another one of those great weeks and I’m excited to have been able to end it visiting family in New York before having to get back to work speaking Monday morning. I head back out west for more talks next week.
Traveling has been a part of my life for a decade of sport now and has been a part of my life touring our country for the past six months. Yes, I complain about it a bit but really, what else could I ask for in life right now… what a wonderful ‘problem’ to have considering the good I get to do!