From sharing a meal to having their families cheer: How Paris offers a 2nd chance for Tokyo Olympians

For four Chicago-area athletes — each of whom made her Olympic debut during the COVID-hobbled Tokyo Games — Paris offers a second chance of sorts.

Olympic triple jumper Tori Franklin hopes to ride a barge down the Seine River during the opening ceremony and venture outside the athletes village to watch a fencing competition.

Rhythmic gymnast Evita Griskenas is excited to share a meal with athletes from other sports without plexiglass separating them.

BMX racer Felicia Stancil looks forward to competing on a familiar track as she vies for the Olympic medal she so narrowly missed three years ago.

Sailor Maggie Shea intends to explore the host city and soak up the atmosphere of what she says could be her last Summer Games.

And all of these plans, they say, will be sweeter knowing their parents will be getting their Olympic moment too.

For these four Chicago-area athletes — all of whom made their Olympic debuts during the COVID-hobbled Tokyo Games — Paris offers a second chance of sorts. It promises a fortnight filled with traditional activities that were forbidden during the pandemic, including attending other competitions, exploring the host city and celebrating with their parents.

The Summer Games are scheduled to begin July 26, with more than 200 countries participating in 329 events. The United States will be sending 592 athletes, more than 50 of whom have qualified for their second Olympics.

“I’m so excited that I’m going to get a real Olympic experience,” said Franklin, a former Downers Grove South High School track star who now calls Chicago home. “I’m just going to milk all of it.”

In Paris, the competitors will find an athletic festival strained by issues that have vexed other host cities: security concerns, budget overruns and fractured public support. It also remains uncertain whether the Seine River will be clean enough for triathletes and marathon swimmers to use, given the water’s E. coli levels frequently surpass the safety standards in Europe and the United States.

Tokyo’s organizers wish they had it so easy.

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In 2020, the pandemic led to the first Olympic Games postponement since World War II. When the event finally took place a year later, it did so under a set of rules that required daily testing, strict arrival and departure times, socially distanced dining and a locked-down athletes village.

To reduce the chances of hosting an international superspreader event, organizers also prohibited spectators from attending competitions, leaving the stands nearly empty and some of the venues so quiet you could hear athletes talking to their coaches. In perhaps the most devastating consequence of the COVID rules, the spectator ban meant the athletes’ families had to stay home too.

“In Tokyo, we were all just grateful it was still being held given what was happening in the world,” said Stancil, the Lake Villa native who finished fourth in 2021 and missed a medal by a fraction of a second. “There were understandably a lot of restrictions, but that only makes it more special this time around.”

From the moment of their postponement in April 2020, the Tokyo Games placed unprecedented stress upon the athletes’ shoulders. Some, like Shea, had already qualified for Team USA by the time the delay was announced and worried — unnecessarily, it turned out — whether their spots would still be guaranteed.

Others, such as Franklin, spent four years preparing so they would peak during the summer of 2020. The training plan for an entire Olympic cycle was upended with a single announcement.

“It was so hard to manage the changes,” said Shea, who finished 11th in the 49erFX regatta with her partner Stephanie Roble in Tokyo. “There were so many things we didn’t know or couldn’t control. It became difficult to manage our energy.”

Nearly every aspect of the Tokyo Games had to be reimagined and reconfigured for 2021. Organizers, for example, prohibited early access to training venues in the months leading up to the competition, which made a difference to BMX riders like Stancil who benefit from knowing a course’s various jumps and turns.

Her only previous experience on the Tokyo track came during an Olympic test event in 2019. By the time she landed in Japan in 2021, she had not ridden on the course for nearly two years.

Paris organizers, in contrast, opened their BMX track to Olympians this summer and Stancil, 29, spent more than two weeks there training on it. By the time she left in early July, she had ridden it hundreds of times and believed the course’s big jumps played to her strengths.

“My times are getting better and better on it,” she said in a telephone interview from Paris in late June. “It is a big thing to be comfortable (on the track) because charging 100% up to a jump is not a normal thing. The more you practice, the more you’re able to execute speed and go over the jumps more efficiently.”

During the Tokyo Games, organizers also established strict rules for the Olympic Village, creating a bubble-like environment that included daily COVID-19 testing, a tracking app and a so-called intimacy ban that frowned on “hugs and handshakes.”  In the dining hall, athletes were encouraged to eat alone or with their teammates at tables that had plexiglass dividers between each seat.

Organizers also dictated the competitors’ arrival and departure times, prohibiting athletes from entering the village sooner than seven days before their event. Once they finished competing, the athletes had 48 hours to leave.

These regulations meant a significant number of athletes were precluded from attending the opening and closing ceremonies, unless they were selected to be their country’s flag bearer. Though Shea’s event took place early enough in the Games to attend the opening festivities, she skipped it because she was staying in a satellite Olympic Village about an hour’s drive from Tokyo.

However, she still participated in a virtual tailoring session for her Ralph Lauren ceremony gear with her teammate — yet another pandemic-driven departure from previous games. Rather than the usual in-person fitting, Roble and Shea measured themselves in a boat park and sent the numbers in.

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Their sartorial efforts resulted in pants so big Roble could pull them up to her chest. The 5-foot-3 sailor borrowed Shea’s pants and marched in the opening ceremony with Team USA.

Neither athlete participated in the closing ceremony because their regatta took place during the first week of competition and they were required to depart the country almost immediately after.

Shea had entered the last Olympic cycle thinking she would retire after the 2020 Games and move on with her life. A disappointing finish in Tokyo and the peculiarities of competing during a pandemic — not to mention the shorter, three-year wait for the next Summer Games — persuaded her to keep sailing a bit longer.

“It just felt like we had unfinished business,” she said.

Shea will, once again, miss the opening ceremony this year because her race is slated to take place in a town about three hours from Paris by train. Once the competition is over, she and Roble, both 35, plan to head to Paris and soak up the atmosphere, including joining the rest of Team USA at the closing ceremony.

Rhythmic gymnast Griskenas, who will compete in the individual all-around event Aug. 8, also intends to skip the opening ceremony in order to get more training time. However, she plans to participate in the closing festivities and enjoy the more social aspects of life in the Olympic Village without worrying about being exposed to COVID.

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“I’m super excited to meet new athletes and see some old friends in the village because we don’t cross paths that often,” the 23-year-old said. “I want to chat with people, learn about some new sports and maybe do some pin trading.”

But of all the new opportunities Paris will afford, Griskenas is most excited about the one involving her parents. After missing the Tokyo Games because of pandemic restrictions, her mother and father will be in the stands next month when she competes on her sport’s biggest stage.

It’s their moment, she said, as much as her own. They’re the ones who shuttled her back and forth to practice for years — a three-hour round-trip drive from their Orland Park home to her training facility in Deerfield — so she could train with the country’s top rhythmic coaches.

Like many Olympic parents, they’re the ones who scrimped and saved so she could chase her dreams. They’re the ones who told her to go ahead and dream in the first place, she said.

“I want to give my parents the proper Olympic experience that they deserve,” Griskenas said. “They’ve been along with me this entire journey and it’s so important to me that they get to share in this moment.”

Before she set sail during the Tokyo Games, Shea also lamented her parents’ absence and wished they could be there to enjoy it. After she and Roble were eliminated from the competition because of an arcane penalty that has since been eliminated from the Olympic rulebook, she missed them even more.

“They’re as much a part of this journey as we are, so I knew I wanted them there for the good stuff,” Shea said. “Until that moment (in Tokyo), I didn’t realize how much I need them there for the tough stuff too.”

For the same reasons, Stancil wanted her father, Jamie, in the stands when she raced in Tokyo. He was her first coach, having introduced her to the sport when she was 4 years old as a way to help her heal from her mother’s death. They traveled the world together as she rose through international ranks and won her first world title at age 9.

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In addition to being her biggest cheerleader, Jamie Stancil is a former professional BMX racer and always has suggestions for improving her performance. The father and daughter typically talk between heats at big competitions, but they had to settle for Facetime and text messages after early races in Tokyo.

“It was really disappointing when they said we couldn’t go,” said Jamie Stancil, who will be in Paris when BMX racing begins Aug 1. “I was glad they didn’t cancel the whole thing because these athletes worked so hard. But it was tough to stay home.”

Tori Franklin’s mother, Tonya, also found it difficult to be more than 6,000 miles away when her daughter competed in Tokyo. She was a mom who never missed a track meet in high school, who came with snacks and juice boxes for everyone, who sat on hard, aluminum benches for more hours than she cares to remember.

But instead of flying to Japan to see the most important competition of her daughter’s life, she went to a viewing party in Orlando hosted by NBC and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. She still raves about the hospitality at the event, but it couldn’t ever compare to being in the stadium when Tori hopped, skipped and jumped her way down an Olympic track.

“It was hard to watch on TV because when she wasn’t jumping, I couldn’t see the things that I normally look for,” Tonya Franklin said. “I like to watch her mannerisms. How is she doing on the field? Is she walking around? Is she dancing? What is the expression on her face? I wanted to know how my child was feeling and I couldn’t do that from so far away.”

Tori Franklin, now 31, finished 25th in Tokyo, failing to reach the finals or meet her own expectations. She rebounded the following season and won bronze at the 2022 world championships — the first podium finish for a female triple jumper from the United States in the sport’s history — with her mom cheering in the stands.

And now she thinks her mother’s presence next month — along with cheering crowds — will help rewrite her Olympic story.

“I’ll be able to feed off an energy that we didn’t have in Tokyo,” Franklin said. “It’s going to make a huge difference.”