Why do I love the Olympics?

I’m often asked why I love the Olympics so much. And I really don’t have a direct answer. It’s a lot of things that clearly have a strong impact on me.

I love that it gives us all something to cheer for together. We sports fans can find something to cheer for year round. Maybe its football season, March madness or the Masters. But how often are we all cheering for the same team or person in those? With the Olympics we’re all cheering for the same team, Team USA, and we tend to gather together to do so. For about three quarters of the games, I was watching with my friends, and not just watching, but also cheering, jumping and screaming together.

Before this stage in my life, I always sat to watch the Olympics with my family. Probably one of the few things we could all agree to watch at night. Which makes me wonder how many things do entire families still gather to watch together?

It doesn’t matter how well we know the sport or how popular it is, we all think we know something about it to a certain extent during the Olympics. We think we know when someone gets a good start off the blocks, or how to determine if someone entered the water vertical on a dive or whether something was a tenth deduction or not. The Olympics are mostly sports we don’t watch all the time (with the exception of basketball) and because of that we all learn together as we watch.

Then there are the things that are exclusive the each Olympic games that we’ll always remember. Did you ever think you’d hear the words badminton and scandal in the same sentence? Or did you ever think you’d actually know what dressage is? And you probably never thought you’d see swimsuits sported by Jamaican women…on the track. Seriously, what were those women wearing in the 4x100m?

In London, we’ve seen what was supposedly the last of the greatest swimmer and arguably the greatest Olympian of all time. We’ve seen three more absolutely unbelievable runs by the greatest sprinter of all time. We saw Grenada, Guatemala and Montenegro win their first Olympic medals And we watched a double amputee run in two Olympic races against able-bodied athletes, even beating some of them.

The journalist in me loves getting to know the athletes in any way I can. I watch feature pieces, interviews and whatever I can find. Most of us enjoy this because I think we like to find a bit of ourselves in the athletes competing. It makes us believe that maybe with a little more talent, or time or resources that could be us. No one ever said there was anything wrong with dreaming.

Every 18 and 36 months we’re allowed to dream, celebrate and cry with the people who represent us by wearing our country’s name on his/her uniform. It’s a unifying feeling that I wish we could experience every day as a country and a human race.

So now I put my USA necklaces and hand-held flag away for the next 544 days until Sochi on February 7, 2014. Or for just the next 46 days until the Ryder Cup.