Jim Redmond, Whose Aid to Son Was an Olympic Moment, Dies at 81

Derek insisted. He had to finish.

“Well, then,” Jim Redmond said, “we’re going to finish this together.”

More attendants approached. Jim waved them away as well.

“I don’t speak Spanish,” he told reporters a few days later, “and I wasn’t going to be stopped by anything.”

By the time they reached the finish line, the crowd was roaring. Camera crews surrounded them. And an intimate moment between a father and a son had become instant Olympic history.

Up until then, the 1992 Olympics had been criticized for its gaudy excesses — the U.S. men’s basketball “Dream Team,” relentless marketing — and persistent rumors about athletes using performance-enhancing drugs. The Redmond story helped at least somewhat rescue the Games’ image.

“It was just a question of me getting on to help him,” Jim Redmond told reporters in 2012. “The Games had lost that sort of direction. It was all about winning, winning, winning. We changed it by showing we were taking part. We brought a different aspect to it without even planning it.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/sports/olympics/jim-redmond-dead.html