from Helene Elliott of the LA Times,

My Winter Olympic experiences have gone from telegrams to Twitter, from a small, isolated village in New York's Adirondack Mountains that produced a sports miracle few people knew about as it unfolded to an international resort on Russia's Black Sea where the world can keep up with every development almost immediately by consulting mobile devices that didn't exist even a few years ago.

The Sochi Games will be my 10th straight Winter Olympics and 14th Games, including Summer Olympics. My first was Lake Placid, and we drove up from Long Island, where I worked for Newsday. My boss, the late Dick Sandler, told me I'd cover figure skating and some hockey. When the underdog American hockey team was eliminated, he said, we would ignore it.

Dick was a wonderful sports editor, but he was slightly off on that prediction.

Chatting last week with Bob Suter, a defenseman on the 1980 U.S. "Miracle on Ice" hockey team, reminded me of how much the Winter Olympics have grown and the massive changes that have taken place over a relatively short period.

continued