The Baer Facts

An Olympic Preview: From My Living Room

This Patch editor is flipped out over the Olympic movement.

As of Friday night, please don’t ring my phone. That’s because I’ll be glued to the tube (as in television), not London subway to watch the march of the athletes in the 2012 Olympics and the well crafted opening ceremonies. There are just places where the Olympics ought to be, and others, not so. Los Angeles is a natural setting. So too is Paris, Melbourne and now London again. But I don’t know about Rio, Moscow, Mexico City or other places that it has been before. The Olympics are my passion. If I had my life to do over, that’s the one thing I’d want to do--be some kind of Olympic athlete. But 90 pound high schoolers who ran slowly in cross country don’t get a spot on the Olympic team. Lucky for me, I got to cover the 1984 Olympics in LA…

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32nd St. Louis Senior Olympics Kicks Off in Creve Coeur

The St. Louis Jewish Community Center is where it all began for the Senior Olympics, back in 1980.

An opening ceremony kicked off the 32nd St. Louis Senior Olympics Thursday afternoon at the St. Louis Jewish Community Center (JCC) in the Staenberg Family Complex. The first Senior Olympics was contested in 1980 at the JCC to help celebrate the center's 100th anniversary. All the other local, state and, eventually, national Senior Olympics blossomed from that first time in St. Louis. Thursday, Jackie Joyner-Kersee told the athletes they were an inspiration to her. Neal Boyd, 2008 winner of "America's Got Talent," sang the national anthem, and two Senior Olympians lit the torch. Dottie Gray does her best to run a 5-kilometer race every weekend. Gray is 86 years old and has participated in the St. Louis Senior Olympics since 1982.  "I've …

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