On sports' world stage in Greece, Baltimore is no bit player

Laura Vecsey

August 31, 2004

ATHENS - So I fly from Baltimore 5,000 miles to Athens, trundle another 180 miles by bus to Olympia to watch the Olympics return to its birthplace, and what do I find?

A Baltimore angle.

A Baltimore story good enough to upstage the shot put - a once-in-a-lifetime event in the most hallowed grounds, considering that Olympia is where sports was born.

Besides Baltimore, that is.

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Baltimore tends to pride itself as the center of the sports universe. Babe Ruth, Johnny Unitas, Cal Ripken - there are only one or two degrees of separation between Baltimore and every important sports story in America.

Some of us itinerant workers who are newcomers to Baltimore sometimes rolled our eyes at the quasi-provincialism with which Baltimore views itself as Sportstown USA.

What fools are we!

In one trip to ancient Greece, I realized Baltimore is correct. It really is the center of the sports universe.

See, in ancient Olympia, me, Mike Wise (The Washington Post) and Bryan Burwell (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) wandered around the grounds at Olympia. We ran into a very nice young man, there to watch his girlfriend compete in the shot put.

After striking up a conversation, it turns out the young man's name is Balvin Brown Jr., and he's a pharmaceutical salesman who lives in Owings Mills.

Burwell and Wise look at me, roll their eyes, decide I'm the luckiest one in Greece, because I have what you call a local angle to my Olympia story. But that was only the start.

It turns out that Balvin, 25, was a two-time All-Metro selection, then went to UMBC, where he threw discus. He met his girlfriend, Cleopatra Borel, at a track meet at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, when she was competing for Coppin State.

Borel transferred to UMBC, where she continued to train and compete in the shot put. She made the Olympic team of her native country, Trinidad.

As it turned out, Cleopatra was not only Brown's girlfriend, but she also had just become Balvin Brown's fiancee.

He proposed! In Olympia! Twenty-eight hundred years after the Games were invented in Olympia! Right after she was among the first women ever allowed to compete at Olympia!

The gods were smiling down on me.

They never stopped, either.

My Sun colleague, Paul McMullen - Baltimore-born and bred - was at the epicenter of the Michael Phelps show for the first eight days of the Games.

Every time Phelps swam, reporters from papers and magazines all over the United States and the world would rush to the mixed zone. There, we'd crowd along the fence, which is the Olympic way of trying to interview athletes as they pass between the pool or court to the locker room.

Well, talk about parting the Red Sea. Every time the press needed comments from Phelps or his North Baltimore Aquatic Club coach, Bob Bowman, the world's media would make room and usher Paul to the front of the pack.

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On sports' world stage in Greece, Baltimore is no bit player

Laura Vecsey

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On sports' world stage in Greece, Baltimore is no bit player

Laura Vecsey

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