Early College Alumna Reports on Paris Olympics

Anna Laible is a 2023 graduate of the LCCC Early College program where she contributed as a staff writer to the Paw Print student newspaper under advisor Jessie Heimann. She is currently majoring in Media and Journalism and minoring in Entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. As part of her program at UNC, Laible and fellow students in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media were invited to the Summer Olympic Games held in Paris. The UNC group, including Laible, stayed for the entirety of the games. Here, Laible provides a reflection on the experience. 

I had always dreamed of attending the Olympic Games to see the world’s best athletes.

I worked as a reporter for the National Dog Show Jr. on Peacock in 2021. Since then, I’ve known that I wanted to cover the next Olympics. After months trying to prove myself in my freshman year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and trusting God, I was told in January I had been selected as the youngest member of the team from UNC to cover these Olympics.

I’ve had big goals since I was young, which is why I worked to earn my associate degree from LCCC by the time I graduated high school. I wanted to learn and grow as much as I could even before moving to a four-year college. LCCC classes challenged me, especially those with my favorite professor, Jessie Heimann, to think in new ways and improve not only my writing skills, but my presentation skills. Those skills have made a big difference when interviewing sports personnel for stories, my podcast and most recently, my first Olympic Games. Without LCCC challenging me as a teenage journalist in high school, I wouldn’t have been as prepared to take on this huge event so young.

The fact that I was covering my first Olympics at 19 years old was hard to wrap my head around. In the months leading up to Paris, we had a UNC team zoom call every month and I had calls with my editor for the Raleigh News & Observer multiple times each month to help prepare for whatever might happen in Paris. In addition, outside of all of these calls, I spent over a dozen hours making a Google calendar of all of the possible events I might cover every day and their scheduled time  so it would make my life easier once I arrived in France. I also made a Google doc with 5-10 different lines of information for every athlete from North/South Carolina that I would likely be covering so that I already had stats from their careers before they even competed. Despite the countless group meetings we had in the months leading up to the Olympics, it still didn’t feel real.

It was pretty much all gas, no brakes for the entire Olympic games. While UNC students worked with different news outlets, I was primarily working for the Raleigh News & Observer, along with their sister outlets in Charlotte and South Carolina. I was paired with one other UNC student, but they had all of their people back in the states. They gave me the freedom to build my schedule to cover athletes from basketball to swimming to field hockey and many more. I wrote a mix of features, game stories, event highlights and everything in between. It was a little hard to juggle communication with a six-hour time difference, but I loved working and learning from these editors.

For some of the features on specific athletes, I had conducted interviews before heading to Paris, since I knew access would be limited. However, for most of my stories, I would conduct research and focus on what I wanted to highlight and base who I targeted for specific interviews on that research. The first day was spent getting acclimated with the hotel and metro, as well as picking up my credential that gave me access to all of the sports venues. From then on the fun really began.

I don’t think it set in that I was a journalist covering the Olympics until I was at gymnastics qualifications in the mixed zone seeing the greatest of all time, Simone Biles, walk by me. When that happened, I realized, “Oh my goodness, I’m really covering the Olympics!”

I had the privilege of covering and interviewing so many of the world’s top athletes including Steph Curry, A’ja Wilson, Suni Lee, Katie Ledecky, Crystal Dunn, and Quincy Hall.

The nerves were there the first day or two, but once I had the chance to talk with and interview NBC gymnastics/basketball reporter Zora Stephenson, I felt myself starting to settle into my role. The experience was on a different level than any other reporting I had done in the United States because it was a global event, and because every sporting competition included athletes who had spent their whole lives working to get to that moment.

I truly felt like every day I went to a venue I was living in a dream. But getting to the venues was a bit of an adventure. I took the metro almost everywhere. Our hotel was about 45 minutes from the main part of Paris so it was usually a 45-75 minute trip one way to get to every venue. For those of us in the media, security was top notch. Because of that, I would sometimes run into time conflicts with events when I went to two to three different venues on one day. That’s when I would meet with my editor to determine what story/event he wanted me to prioritize.

After going to the gate designated for the media at every venue, we would get our credential scanned and then walk through metal detectors to enter., Depending on the venue, the media seating varied but it was always in the stands near spectators but there were 3-5 other workers at venues checking credentials.

I had the pleasure of going to different sports and medal finals including track and field, gymnastics, basketball, field hockey, diving, soccer and swimming. I loved meeting amazing journalists from South Africa, Kenya, Canada, the United Kingdom and other countries and reconnecting with friends including Coley Harvey, Ci Michael, Julie Foudy, and Christine Brennan.

If I had to pick a favorite event, it would be the women’s gymnastics all-around final. I can remember watching gymnastics as a gymnast eight years ago at my gym with my teammates. We saw Simone in her first Olympics, so to see her in person as a role model both on and off the floor was truly incomparable.

While it’s bittersweet that my time covering my first Olympic Games has come to a close after writing 26 stories, I’m incredibly grateful God allowed me to have this opportunity and I hope it is the first of many more to come!

For more information on the Early College and Dual Enrollment programs visit the website. For more information on the Communication program at LCCC, click here. 

Some of Laible’s articles for the Raleigh News and Observer are linked below:

How a hot pink kayak led NC native Evy Leibfarth on a path to the Paris Olympics

From Elon to the Olympics: Former college basketball player on NBC broadcast crew in Paris

Coached by former UNC assistant, Luisa Blanco makes her Olympic gymnastics debut in Paris