by Scott Sady

The Tahoe area has always been a breeding ground for winter olympic athletes and this year at Sochi is no exception. We already have a South Lake Tahoe girl, Jamie Anderson with a gold and Squaw Valley’s Julia Mancuso steps it up for a medal in her third straight olympics. In honor of the great place we live in and the athletes that this place seems to breed, I have put together a few photos from previous olympics that I shot as part of USA Today’s Alpine event photo staff. The alpine events are usually fairly far away from the main olympic hub. During the Torino olympics in Italy, I was based in Sestriere, a small mountain town about 60 miles and several hours from Torino. I only saw the main city while coming and going. Sochi appears to be similar, with the mountain venues located up in the Caucus range, well away from Sochi proper, which is a tropical resort town.

I shot the Salt Lake olympics in 2002 and the Torino Olympics in 2006 and I can tell you that digital camera technology has come a long, LONG way! My first olympics were on the amazing 6-megapixle, horrible in low light Nikon D2h. Boy how spoiled we are now getting 10 frames per second at 20+ megapixles with great images at iso 8000. During the women’s downhill in Salt Lake, I positioned myself under the main jump to get a great air shot of the ladies flying by. It was a blind approach, meaning you couldn’t see uphill, and my camera fired about 3 frames per second. So I actually had to listen for the sound of their turn building up and the edge releasing to know they were about to fly overhead, then push the shutter once and pray.