Over the past few Games, my blogs have become an entity of their own.
Usually funny, sometimes fuzzy ... They were a chance for me to tell the stories you don't see.
This Games I was a little hard up for topics ... For funny, goofy moments ... For inspiration I suppose.
So my apologies.
But my last night in Rio, one fell into my lap.
After a day of running around from one end of the city to the other and back again, I had plans to spend my last night at USA House meeting up with friends, having a beverage or two and finally getting to burn one of the two free passes we get without spending the night working.
I had one last interview though. Other than the logistics of getting into the village to pick up the athlete (three buses right there) and getting credentials into the broadcast building which might have involved emailing some paper offering my seventh born child's soul 96 hours in advance, this was an easy activity.
I was in for an affiliate interview. No hard questions ... Just some hometown love for an athlete. And, bonus, we were getting dinner first so I could catch up and be social without the hustle and bustle that comes with all the running around.
And it was easy. The local station was great to deal with, super excited to see their hometown girl. The rain was minimal. The shot looked great.
And then one of the staff said to Kat: "Hey, do you have time to take a tour around?"
"Ummmmm, yes please" was pretty close to the reply.
And then the magic happened.
By this point, I'd made multiple rounds of the NBC halls during what is coined as "Managing Victory." And the NBC staff is great. They run a tight ship and everything is calculated down to the minute. Britt and Jennie and crew were great to our athletes (and made sure every one of them was well fed, properly coiffed and made up), but there's not a lot of free time due to that whole, ya know, schedule thing.
But then this guy we'd never met ... Who probably had 500 things to do ... Decided to take a good 45 minutes to show a first-time Olympian around.
You see, Kat's a women's épée fencer and they missed the medal rounds by one touch. In overtime.
Painful.
But it also meant that this was her first time seeing the inside of the crazy circus that is NBC at the Games.
And, while she was just supposed to swing by for a quickie interview, the staffer gave her the full red carpet. A look at the control room ... A trip to the cafeteria. Complete with desserts and McCafe. A visit to the newsroom and pix with the Buzzfeed guys.
And then a trip to the studio itself where they had a break from taping, so the host who had interviewed several medalists previously chatted her up. The production crew had the lights pulled up for her to take pictures. The backdrop was changed because they thought the flame was a better picture. She was invited to take more pictures at the anchor desks.
The Olympian was like a kid at Christmas and the crew (who admittedly had some downtime before the evening show) loved having an athlete who was just having fun on set with no pressure and no ticking clock.
At the end, I joked that maybe she should skip med school and go into television and Kat was on cloud nine after "one of the coolest experiences" of the Games.
The whole thing reminded me that, after all the nail biting and stress and drama that goes into this five ring circus is done, the Olympics really is a magical experience.
And the staff at NBC may or may not have known that they made the day of an athlete who will hopefully be back on that set in four years with a medal. But, for now, she got to live it up in the Peacock Castle and knows what she's in for in Tokyo. And her PR wench got to be reminded of why we all sign on for four years of crazy.
