I love the olympics!

Thursday May 26^th

Today was a really fun day.  We went to the Musee Olympics.  The headquarters of the IOC is here in Lausanne and there is a nice Olympic museum and Park. I didn’t think it would take long to do the museum as it was pretty small, but we ended up spending almost four hours there.  The park and museum are right on Lake Geneva with the park rising up from the shores and the museum looking out from the top of the park over the lake.   The park is full of statues that represent different Olympic ideals, or specific host cities, like a totem from Vancouver.  There is also an Olympic cauldron with the flame always lit. I really enjoyed seeing the Olympic flame up close. I absolutely love the Olympics and always have, and Katie loves them too, so this was a great museum for us.

The first floor had exhibits on the games themselves.  Things like learning the process to become a host city, information on the founder of the modern Olympics, a lot of excellent ancient Greek pottery with sports themes in the etchings and a short movie on the games.  While we were looking at a basketball signed by the Dream Team, a group of Swiss boys in about 8^th grade were nearby.  They heard me talking to Katie and one of the boys got very excited. “You are Americain?”  He asked in a heavy French accent.   I confirmed that we were and he and his friends talked excitedly among themselves, while staring at us.

“Are you from Lausanne?” I asked him. 

“Yes!” he replied and his friends burst out in laughter. “I mean no,” he clarified. “We are on a trip with school.”  His friends kept laughing at him, but I thought it was great that he was trying out his English on us.  They wandered off to talk to a bunch of girls from his school.  Apparently he and his friends told them how he talked to the Americans, and the girls were like “We have to see this!”  Next thing we know we were surrounded by about 15 kids, 1 trying to talk, and 14 listening.  When he opened his mouth to talk, the girls burst out laughing. So I told him his English was very good, and to keep it up.  They soon dispersed and we continued on in the museum.

My favorite display on the first floor was one with a torch from the torch relay of every single modern Olympic torch relay, along with several TVs showing iconic images from the relays and the torch lightings.  Scenes like the archer lighting the cauldron in Lillehammer, Muhammad Ali lighting the flame in Atlanta, and Cathy Freeman lighting it in a pool of water in Sydney.  I’m such a softie for the Olympics that these scenes made me tear up.

We also saw scenes of the Olympic flame being lit.  It is a huge ceremony with women in Greek goddess costumes lighting the flame using the sun in an ancient Greek temple in Olympus.  They do this for each Olympics to start the torch relays.  Really cool!

Upstairs the displays were more about the athletes, with a lot of signed sports equipment, and tons of touch screen computers with info on famous athletes from many different countries and videos of their performances.  We watched clips of weightlifters from Poland, Tae Kwan Doe experts from France, Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin games, Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner Kersee, white water kayakers, and on and on and on.  It was so great to show Katie the iconic athletes and their performances. Half of the displays upstairs were winter and half were summer and we got to see a 20 minute movie with top Olympic performances.

There were several special exhibits on how the Olympics bring people together and promote peace, and some on how the Olympics promote gender and racial equality.  There was an entire room with every stamp with an Olympic theme that has been issued worldwide and all the Olympic posters.  On the lower level was a display on overcoming prejudice, which we skipped, a big library and two theaters. In one we saw a 20 minute set winter Olympic clips which had been filmed in 3D at the Salt Lake City games.  The other was a set of individual TVs and computer monitors loaded with TV clips from every broadcast Olympics.  With your admission you got two clips, but you could buy more if you wanted.  Each clip was about 10 minutes long.  The museum was great - you get to sit and watch sports on TV!  I picked the women’s gymnastics finals at the 1976 Olympics where Nadia Comaneci scored the perfect 10s.  It was the first time Katie saw her performances.  For my second clip I decided on Mary Lou Retton in the 1984 games – again the first time Katie saw the performances.  Katie wanted me to pick a good set of ice skating for her, so we did the 1996 winter games with Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. She wanted volleyball for her second clip so we watched the Beijing Olympics Women’s beach volleyball final between the US and China. 

We finished with the gift shop which a lot of London 2012 gear, and finally dragged ourselves away to have lunch along Lake Geneva.  After lunch we switched into our swim suits and rented a great paddleboat with a slide on it!  It was a little cool and windy today and for most of the time we were the only paddleboat on the lake.  The lake was cool, but not cold, and we each did the slide a number of times.  It was really pretty fun, although the slide was higher and steeper sitting at the top than you would expect!