CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy -- CORTINA D'AMPEZZO, Italy (AP) — Washington Post columnist Barry Svrluga was reporting from his first Winter Olympics when Lindsey Vonn left her hospital bed after a crash and returned to compete days later at the 2006 Turin Games.He is back in Italy two decades later at the Milan Cortina Games and was there again to write about it when Vonn ended up back in the hospital following another crash.Even though he’s losing his job.The Post announced two days before the Olympics opened last week that it was eliminating its sports section while laying off a third of its staff.
Svrluga said the newspaper originally planned to send 14 staff members to these Games.With air tickets and accommodation already paid for, Svrluga is one of four of the paper’s journalists who decided to still come: He is in Cortina, Rick Maese is in Bormio, and Les Carpenter and national staffer Robert Samuels are in Milan.“They can take away our section,” Svrluga said, “but in a way, they can’t take away our spirit.”Of the four, Svrluga and Carpenter are being laid off.They came to their final assignment anyway.“I wanted to be occupied,” said Svrluga, who is at his 12th Games.
“I love covering the Olympics.… I had Lindsey injured in Sestriere and then had her gold (Vancouver, 2010) and I’ve had every one of her Olympic races, whether they were successes or not.
Same with (Mikaela) Shiffrin.”The first Olympics that Svrluga worked at was the 2004 Athens Summer Games and he was immediately struck by the way colleagues at the paper collaborated at such a big event.“It felt like a team sport for us and that benefited the section and the paper,” Svrluga said.“What we’re trying to do here is remind people — readers and decision makers — that these are a lot of committed people who were doing things for the right reasons."Carpenter, the Post’s Olympics writer, is at his eighth Games.
He's been covering figure skating, speedskating and...