[T]eam USA’s Peggy Shinn just flew more than 14 hours to South Korea, all to jump into nearly three weeks of skiing and snowboarding, luging, bobsledding and biathlon shooting.
More amazingly, Shinn squeezed all her necessary equipment into two suitcases, from her MacBook laptop to her smartphone, recorder “and good ol’ pen and paper.” That’s because the Vermonter isn’t attending as an athlete. Instead, she’s reporting on this month’s Winter Games in Pyeongchang for the U.S. Olympic Committee’s website, TeamUSA.org.
Shinn had worked as a freelance writer for the nation’s major ski magazines — reaping awards from the North American Snowsports Journalists Association — when she began her Olympic Committee assignment in 2008. She covered the Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada, in 2010 and Sochi, Russia, in 2014 and the Summer Games in London, England, in 2012 and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2016.
“I have to look at the schedule each day and determine which event the U.S. has the best chance of winning a medal in,” she says. “Every day I’ll be covering at least one event — no days off.”
Shinn flew some 7,000 miles over the weekend from Burlington to Detroit to the South Korean capital of Seoul, then boarded a train for the Alpensia ski resort.
“I collapsed into bed and slept all of two hours,” she emailed Sunday. “It’s 4 a.m., and I’m wide awake.”
While covering all top U.S. athletes at the mountain venues, Shinn will keep an eye on the nearly 30 Olympians with ties to her home state.
“I’m so jingoistic — I really like to cover the Vermont athletes.”
Shinn will feel at home among the media: Two-time Olympian Doug Lewis of Fayston is working as an alpine analyst for NBC Universal Sports, and Peter Graves of East Thetford will serve as a public address announcer.
Shinn’s TeamUSA.org coverage will be online daily from the start of the Olympics this Friday to its finish Feb. 25. After, the author of the 2013 book “Deluge: Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont’s Flash Floods and How One Small State Saved Itself” will return home to promote her new title, “World Class: The Making of the U.S. Women’s Cross-Country Ski Team.”
Shinn’s 94-year-old mother isn’t happy with all the recent headlines about neighboring North Korea’s nuclear threats. But the Vermonter — who faced terrorism concerns four years ago in Russia — is looking forward to her latest assignment.
“South Korea is a great country with a great infrastructure, and I think it will be a great event,” she says. “We all were a little concerned a few months ago, but geopolitics have cooled down, and the Olympics bring out the best in humanity.”
