Gay Games Reconsidered

 by Bob Nelson

It won’t come as any surprise to anyone, I hope, that the Gay Games VII were something of a disappointment, for me at least.  Most of the folks I’ve hung out with when we go to Games – the triathletes, bikers and runners from New York – didn’t go to this Games.  Although there was a Team New York, amply represented by more than 300 athletes, those were mostly people new to the Games.  For me, there was no real New York team.

Maybe the destination wasn’t sufficiently exotic – Chicago?  And a fair number of folks told me they were fed up with the rivalry between the Federation of Gay Games, which is responsible for choosing a host city, and Montreal, which became the bad boy of queer athletics when it couldn’t agree with the Federation on the rules of the Games.  As a result, we had two Games – Gay Games in Chicago during the third week of July 2006, and a new event called OutGames, held in Montreal the first week of August.

So when it came time to make my plane reservations, I set aside just four days for the Games, and the rest of the week for some R&R with my mom and her husband at their lakeside cabin in northern Michigan.  I don’t regret the choice.

It’s not that the Chicago Games weren’t well-run.  In fact, I was surprised at just how well run they were.  Registration was a breeze, since there was an option that allowed you to e-mail your photo, so my badge was all ready and waiting for me when I got to the Hilton early Saturday morning, the day of Opening Ceremonies.  All the events I attended went off right on time and were reasonably well run from what I could see. 

The bike races were very professional, with an announcer who clearly did the same job most spring and summer weekends and starting line personnel who were both fair and efficient.  All the events I saw were well-attended.  Indeed, Chicago boasted of 11,000 athletes, which would put it behind only New York and Amsterdam in the sheer number of competitors.  At the mandatory bike meeting the day before competition started, there were easily a hundred or more bikers, with people drifting in and out of the room.  More than 200 had registered for biking events, about the same as in Sydney, the most recent Games, in 2002.

I did hear that the splits in the triathlon were screwed up, and my own dnf appeared magically as a 2:54 finish, which would have placed it in my top five Olympic distance finishes.  A friend from Atlanta wrote to me that his picky triboy friends complained that the transition area was too small (though no smaller than other transition areas I’ve seen for a similar number of competitors, more than 400) and that the organizers ran out of water on the run course, on a day when the mercury swelled to 92 degrees. 

No, I think it was just a personal perspective, that these Games were not the rah-rah-let’s-go kind of Games I’d been to in the past, but a Games diminished by the shadow of Montreal.  Yes, I did have a stomach virus while I was in Chicago, which certainly didn’t brighten my spirits.  So I skipped anything that I hadn’t signed up for, including the “meet and greet” bar events for cycling and triathlon, which would have been a great way to network with other queer athletes from around the country, if not the globe.

Given the number of bikers that Fast and Fab sent to the Games, four, I have to say we really cleaned up. As usual, the women did much better than the men did.  Paulette Meggoe, our perennial medal-winner, got a gold in the criterium and two silvers, one in the road race and one in the individual time time trial.  Justine Repaci, at her first Gay Games, got a bronze in the road race.  And Justine and Paulette were both on the winning team time trial team, Team Kate, that also included Kate Rowe from Australia and Linda Taillon from Los Angeles.  The women’s showing reminded me of when the Fast and Fab men won the gold in the team time trial, back in 1998 in Amsterdam.  Those were the days!

And I did see a few friends I hadn’t seen in a while.  Jay Hill, who wore a Fast and Fab jersey in his events, now lives in San Diego but we stay in touch.  He was the executive director of the Games in New York in 1994, and the Chicago organizers got him in to his events for free.  He did the same bike race I did, the criterium, and I met his sister and brother-in-law, a former bike racer who started working in a bike shop when he was 17.  Terry Cosgrove, who was in the group of  five of us who did Ride the Rockies in 2005, was in my heat of the criterium, and we broke the race-day tension by trading insults at the starting line – then finished with “May the girl with the highest heels win!” 

Every four years I get to see Kate Rowe, who is the Federation’s cycling representative and who has to be one of the most energetic and outgoing people I have ever met.  And a few jocks from New York I hung out with at Opening Ceremonies, a half-dozen Front Runners and the swimmers from Team New York Aquatics, all wonderful folks.  My hosts in Chicago helped me with all kinds of details, from lending me a car so I could get to the triathlon at 5 a.m., to hauling my bike, in its box, to the UPS to ship it back to New York.

I will say, now that the Outgames have taken place in Montreal, that Chicago seems to have made a good showing in terms of organization and attendance, though of course everyone will have a different perspective on this.  Montreal seems to have had more imaginative  Opening and Closing Ceremonies – the Opening Ceremonies at Chicago were more political than they needed to be – and Montreal’s competition results were presented more coherently on their web page.   Chicago ballyhooed its 11,000 participants on its homepage, but you had to dig into Montreal’s press releases to find out that 12,000 athletes from 111 countries had attended – who you gonna believe?   Montreal did have government subsidies that Chicago didn’t, and more time to pull their events together.  One New Yorker who went to Montreal told me of Jumbotron-style TV’s that ran coverage of the events, and a wide spectrum of athletes from different countries, though possibly not 111.

I still think these big events are a great way to meet queer athletes from other countries, and maybe it’s not such a horrible thing that we now have two different events that give us that opportunity.  For a lot of us, though, it’s digging deep to try to go to Europe twice in two years – Copenhagen for the Outgames in 2009 and Cologne for Gay Games in 2010.  We shall see.