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I tell anyone in the newsroom who will listen: There’s always a food angle. So imagine how happy I was when the people who assembled the team covering the Winter Olympics listened and handed me a plane ticket.
I’ve spent the last week blowing the lid off Big Parma. Really, it was a deep dive into why Parm’s big sister Grana Padano has spent millions at the Winter Games trying to position itself as the cheese of athletes.
The New York Times approaches Olympic coverage like a team sport. In addition to our cousins at The Athletic, who go granular on the sports competition, The Times has a crew of 22 reporters, editors, photographers, graphics journalists and support staff in Italy.
Why so many? The Olympics are about the competition, yes. But the games are built on a complex global web of logistics, politics, money and — at its heart — people. And it’s hard for those watching the action from home to understand the sheer amount of territory involved. The venues stretch nearly 8,500 square miles.
To cover all of that with depth and breadth, we need a deep bench. We’re all working different angles depending on our interests and expertise — my colleague Andrew Keh, for example, wrote beautifully about the history of carbo-loading here in the land of a thousand pastas.
The days start and end on our group chat, where we get dispatched to cover breaking news, help one another fact check and keep a running commentary on all the quirks of a global sporting event. (The discussion of the iconic skater wavy mane and Stanley Tucci is particularly spicy.)
Everyone is braced for the news that inevitably pops up around a major global event. When an athlete is disqualified over political statements, the president verbally attacks an American skier or a 21-year-old college student emerges to change the face of figure skating, a journalist is there.
You might know Doug Mills. He’s photographed presidents for four decades and won his third Pulitzer Prize last year He came straight to the Games from another major sporting event, the Super Bowl.
Gabriela Bhaskar, who published a family self-deporting from Los Angeles, is hauling more equipment through the mountains than a Kardashian on vacation. We have the photographer James Hill in Cortina. It’s his seventh Olympics. Vincent Alban, a Times visual journalism fellow, is covering his first.
Most of the team is in Milan, where Ilia Malinin (the Quad God), speedskaters and hockey players compete. Motoko Rich, who recently left Tokyo to become the Rome bureau chief, is the geopolitical anchor and, surprisingly, developed a newfound love for figure skating. Tariq Panja, a global sports correspondent who has covered eight Olympics, is the real muscle of the team. Then there is Juliet Macur, who has been writing about figure skating since 2003, and Josephine de La Bruyère, a researcher and fluent Italian speaker.
Jump on a train (and then a bus) and in five hours, you will arrive in Bormio, where I am sharing a little apartment with Patricia Mazzei, The Times’s Miami bureau chief. Not only does she make impeccable espresso and speak Italian, but she has also become an expert in the new Olympic sport of ski mountaineering. (It’s as purely Alpine as it gets: skiers go up and then down a mountain.) That’s especially impressive for someone who has a near pathological distaste for the cold.
If you have read any of our coverage of the skeleton races and the disqualification of the Ukrainian athlete who wanted to wear a helmet bearing images of his fallen friends, then you know the work of Heather Knight. She traveled 21 hours to get to her post in Cortina. She is teamed up with Jason Horowitz, who the bureau chief in Rome for eight years — and may know more about Italy than any of us.
Fans of our coverage have seen the complex graphics, like one showing how Ilia Malinin landed that quadruple axel. That’s the work of a team that includes Joe Ward, Jeremy White, Bedel Saget and Weiyi Cai.
The logistics to make all of this work was an Olympic event itself. A bureau had to be built inside the massive Olympic media building. Tickets and hotel rooms booked. Credentials secured and battles with Olympic bureaucracy waged.
It’s a project that started almost as soon as the Paris games ended. Libby White, very possibly the most organized Brit on the planet, is our General Patton, with help from Everado Prado and Victor Berthelet.
Now I am going to try to stick the landing. Shashank Bengali, who usually leads the breaking news team in London, is our coach.
I asked him how he managed to keep this sprawling, ambitious and slightly cantankerous team of journalists running.
“My job,” he said, “is basically to say yes to their ideas as much as possible.”
Kim Severson is an Atlanta-based reporter who covers the nation’s food culture and contributes to NYT Cooking.
The post At the Winter Olympics, Covering the Piste and Big Parma appeared first on New York Times.
