Hard to top covering Rosalynn Sumners at 1984 Winter Olympics

Published 10:08 pm Friday, December 10, 2010

In nearly three decades as a sports journalist for Pacific Northwest newspapers, including almost 20 years at The Herald, Craig Weckesser covered some of the region’s best teams and most outstanding athletes.

It was a career of many highlights, says the now-retired Weckesser, but nothing topped a trip to the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, where he reported on a young Edmonds figure skater named Rosalynn Sumners.

“Unquestionably, it was the most demanding, yet the most rewarding experience in my nearly 30 years as a reporter and an editor,” Weckesser said. “That trip for me was pretty incredible. I’d done some traveling for The Herald before that, but there was certainly nothing like this.”

Even now, a quarter-century later, “the whole experience is still very vivid,” he said.

Weckesser joined The Herald in 1969 after working previously at the Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, Wash. He went on to cover a variety of sports, from high schools to the pros, including beats with the University of Washington and the Seattle Sounders of the old North American Soccer League.

But it was a phone call in the late 1970s that introduced him to figure skating.

The caller was a coach named Lorraine Borman, and she asked if Weckesser would be interested in doing a story on a promising young skater. He agreed, and the skater — it was Sumners — would become the subject of many more stories over the next several years.

By the early 1980s, Sumners was America’s top female skater. She was a world junior champion, a three-time U.S. champion and a world champion, all in the space of four years. And after a dominating performance at the 1984 U.S. championships in Salt Lake City, she was a sure-fire medal contender and perhaps the gold-medal favorite heading into the Olympics.

With a Snohomish County athlete set to take the world stage, The Herald sent Weckesser to Sarajevo.

It was, he remembers, a frenetic 19 days in the Yugoslavian city, with two exhausting travel days to get there and another two coming home.

“It was an incredibly demanding schedule,” he said. “You worked every day. And then to be so far away from home. There was a nine-hour time difference, so you were trying to think that through every time you tried to send a story (back to the paper). You were thinking, ‘Now is it before deadline or is it after deadline?’”

Weckesser, who was accompanied on the trip by his wife, Susan, had the chance to enjoy other Olympic events. He attended the opening ceremonies, and later watched as American skiers Phil Mahre and Debbie Armstrong, both from Washington, received gold medals.

His primary focus, though, was women’s figure skating. Or as he put it, “I was covering Rosalynn from sunup to sundown.”

He watched and reported as Sumners led after the initial compulsory program, then slipped to second behind East German Katarina Witt following the short program. Two days later, Witt held off Sumners during the free skate to win the gold medal by a narrow margin. Sumners, who’d left some necessary elements out of her last program, received the silver medal.

Though Sumners came up short, “her final performance was electric,” Weckesser said. “I’d seen it a number of times and I knew the music almost by heart, so I knew what to expect. And I knew, as all of us did who’d followed her closely, that she’d missed a couple of jumps.

“Katarina Witt had skated before Rosalynn, and Rosalynn’s performance just wasn’t enough to offset Katarina’s strong, clean program. It just wasn’t to be,” he said.

Minutes after the final results were announced, Weckesser interviewed a disappointed, but gracious Sumners.

“She seemed frustrated, but very accepting,” he said. “She knew she hadn’t quite hit what she needed to hit, so she was satisfied and understanding that she ended up with the silver.”

After the Olympics, Sumners embarked on a long and successful career in professional skating. Weckesser returned home, and after a much-deserved respite resumed his usual duties at The Herald.

He left the newspaper four years later and briefly worked at two other area papers before moving with his wife to Olympia, where he took jobs in the information offices of the state Department of Agriculture and later the Olympia Region Clean Air Agency.

Weckesser retired in 2004 and today lives in Westport, where he is a substitute teacher and tutor in the Ocosta School District.

Many of his Sarajevo memories are poignant, largely because of a civil war that devastated much of the city in the early 1990s. In 1993, five years after leaving the paper, Weckesser wrote a story for The Herald, recalling his Olympic experiences and wondering the fates of so many people he’d met in Sarajevo, which is today the capital of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“In retrospect,” he said, “(the war) makes that whole experience sad in a way, and yet even more special.”

Today, the 68-year-old Weckesser has wonderful recollections of an event that surpasses all others in his long and distinguished journalism career.

“It’s hard to put into words what the 19 days of an Olympics was like,” he said. “It is, by far and away, the most memorable experience of my career. There’s nothing else that compares.”