Spearmaster at the 1984 Olympics

84olympics3.gifHi all - been a long time since I had any updates, and been quite busy and travelling quite a bit.  Today, I thought I’d share with you the story of how I made it to the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

At the time, I was studying (well ok, that’s a bit of a stretch) at the University of Southern California - and I saw an ad inviting people to apply as security personnel for the Olympic Villages.

The pay being offered was quite good - somewhere around $8 per hour - so I applied, took all the relevant tests, and finally met the requirements to become a security guard at the Olympics.

As luck would have it, I got assigned to the USC Olympic Village - perfect since I was already studying there and knew the campus quite well.  For the first month, during which preparations and setup was being done for the Olympics, I got to patrol many different locations on the campus… but after a month, I got promoted to Sergeant - which meant that I would gain responsibility for one of the residential areas.

As it turns out, I got assigned to my own dormitory area!  This area was to house a number of visiting teams, amongst them the Germans and the Spanish - and frankly I was relishing the challenge.  But in the weeks before the Olympics, the supervisors had a greater task at hand - trying to figure out how to get pizza delivered through the electrically-charged fences surrrounding the USC Village.

As it turned out, there was a small part of the area in my section under which a pizza could be slipped under the fence… so for the next few days one of my major tasks was to ensure that pizza was safely delivered :)

Finally, the Olympics arrived - this was to be one of the most exciting times of my life, as I had once hoped to qualify as an athlete on the Hong Kong National team… but that’s another story for later… as well as a hint about how I gained my nickname.

Read Part 2

No Responses to “Spearmaster at the 1984 Olympics”

You can subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post. You can also reply to this post directly in your weblog, and take advantage of the TrackBack URI to record your reply in this post.

  1. No comments posted yet

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.