With less than a year to go to Tokyo, TeamSA is involved in a #FlashbackToInspire2020 campaign. In this story Karien Jonckheere, a journalist covering the Rio Olympics in 2016, gives a personal insight into the first of our series.
Rio 2016 was my fourth Olympics as a reporter and by far the most challenging, just in terms of distances between venues and the scarcity of late-night media transport.
One night I worked late at the athletics venue – it must have been one of several exceptional medal nights for Team SA – and I totally lost track of time. When I looked up, the tribune where I had been working in the stands was completely empty of other journos, so I set off to try to find a way to get home – only to discover I was locked inside the stadium.
At every exit I came across, there was an armed guard shouting at me in Portuguese, telling me I couldn’t go out that way. The door I usually went through to the venue media centre was also locked.
It was now about 2am. I was just starting to have visions of bunking down for a deeply uncomfortable night in the stands when I managed to track down a colleague on the shaky phone network. He contacted a volunteer in the media centre who was dispatched to come to my rescue. A massive relief and not a whole lot of fun, but a good story to tell afterwards.
Along with the exhaustion and frustrations came the absolute highs of course – Mr Van Niekerk providing the highest of these with his phenomenal world record. I remember trying to tweet a reaction after the race and my hands were actually shaking too much to type. Just brilliant.
At the end of a gruelling Games, we journos felt we all deserved a medal. Of course, nobody was going to award us one for our efforts, so we took it upon ourselves and scaled the podium after the final night of athletics action.
Rio is a crazy, exhilarating place but one word of warning if you ever travel there … stay away from the Caipirinhas. They’re lethal.