Nicholas Scarvelis, the (native of Santa Barbara) Shotput’s Greek national champion & Olympian, is blogging at stivoz.gr Athletics portal. Following you can read his entry blog as originally written in english :
I wear special shoes to maximize this effect, rounded and hard, made to reduce the friction between me and the ground, so I can move with speed. And if I’m doing it right, I can harness the angular momentum of my sweeping legs and twisting hips and put it to work. Then the release, the moment of violence, the punch.
On good throws the shot hardly spins. If you’ve done it right, the 7.26kg sphere will rotate slowly like a tiny planet, serene and momentarily suspended in the air until, transforming into a meteorite, it smashes back to Earth.
I didn’t expect this skill of shot putting to define me: and when I look back over my young adulthood so far, it has. I didn’t know it would be the constant in my life which unites where I am and the places I’ll go. And I certainly didn’t know that it would lead me and my family, in the peculiar and winding way that it has, back to Greece.
Saying “back” implies that I’d been to Greece before June of 2015 when I hadn’t. That was a first for both me and my sister Stamatia, a blur of summer island sun and new faces which set the tone for our times over there ever since. Why I say “back” is because growing up Greek-American involved understanding that the world around me, the one made up of Denny’s and Britney Spears and Titanic and Monday Night Football, was only the plastic side effect of emigration. My family’s real culture, our soil, the intricate web of stuff which dictated how our family lived and ate and conducted itself in society was back some ways across the Atlantic. This is the reality of a lot of Americans: immigrants and their lineage awash in the melting pot, united under a flag but each belonging to another place.
And so Greece was tied to my identity without ever having to be stamped into my passport.
That made June of 2015 all the more surreal, when I did land at Eleftherios Venizelos and found myself hurtling through the Athens night, head sticking out the taxi window like an oversized dog. Accompanying me, my sister, and my mother into town was Dimitris Michelarakis, one of the people responsible for engineering our inclusion into the national team. We arrived at the Oasis Hotel past midnight and ate spaghetti in the empty lobby as Dimitris outlined how exactly we’d be procuring our Greek passports, ID cards, and SEGAS IDs before shipping out for Heraklion and the European Cup taking place there in a couple days. The next morning we took off into the city.
So much was familiar about the place, and yet I felt removed from it all, a memory of a dream. The dream Greece of my childhood – the sepia background in photos of my great-grandparents, the Nana Mouskouri and Haris Alexiou CD’s from long family road trips, Yia Yia’s koulouria – collided with the graffitied concrete of a very real country, one weeks away from defaulting on its second multi-billion euro bailout.
That trip was the just the beginning of what’s been a series of stays in Greece over the past few years, each time learning more of the language, eating some new fantastic dish, or gaining a fresh perspective on the mounting political tensions of the nation. Getting familiar with this Greece, the modern state warts and all, has felt like being reintroduced to a part of myself I thought I knew. Traveling there so often recently has turned my somewhat two dimensional ethnicity into a rich and ever-rewarding aspect of my life. And in a way, it’s transformed my family’s history into part of our future.
So I keep throwing the shot, turning my feet as fast as I can, thankful for the circle it’s leading me in.
