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When we think of the Olympic Games, we picture athletes celebrating atop the medal stand.

But Pacific Northwest author and award winning journalist Doug Levy says some of the most compelling stories are never really told.

That's why he's discussing his new book, Hero Redefined, a collection of inspirational stories that go beyond the headlines of the Olympic Games.

Seattle based author Doug Levy is next on northwest, now.

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Doug Levy is best known in Washington state for the years he spent as a contract lobbyist representing cities and towns here in western Washington.

But before becoming a policy warrior in Olympia, he was a University of Oregon journalism major and a sportswriter for the Tri-Cities Herald and The Columbian.

In Vancouver.

Now in retirement, he's circled back to the typewriter or by now, the word processor, sharing the untold stories of Olympic athletes in his new book, Hero Redefined.

Doug, thanks so much for coming to northwest.

Now having a conversation about your book Heroes Redefined.

It really, I think is a great concept of taking, athletes, off the TV screen and, and really humanizing them with some great stories you have to tell that we'll get to.

I want to start that with a little bit about your bio.

Talk a little bit about your childhood where did you come up?

And, what's your background?

Yeah, I have a bit of a screwy story for the northwest.

I grew up on Long Island and, lived a couple places in New York with my family.

And then we moved out to Portland, Oregon, when I was in going into junior high school.

So then I was, I went to high school in the suburbs of Portland.

I went to University of Oregon.

Then I did a couple newspaper jobs in the state of Washington for about five years now.

Let's talk about those.

The Herald and the Columbian.

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

The Tri-City Herald and the Vancouver Columbian.

And started out thinking I was going to be, you know, a great sports columnist on my way to Sports Illustrated.

And then I then it occurred to me that there were a lot of more important things going on, and I segue it into news and politics.

And so I did that as a reporter for about five years.

And then I, I started having some some doubts about the newspaper business.

I wish I could tell you I was clairvoyant, but I was just going to say, trust your instincts and went to Washington, D.C.. I was a congressional staffer for five years, and then my wife and I settled, in, in Everett and then Kenmore in the central Puget Sound, where we've been ever since.

Now you spent a lot of years you're probably best known in this state as a contract lobbyist down in Olympia, representing cities and towns in the municipalities.

Talk a little bit about going over to the dark side.

Because when it comes to public relations and government relations, a lot of people in journalism kind of consider that the dark side.

How did you get started in that?

And, that ended up being a pretty huge career for you.

It did.

And it it, it was a really natural evolution, believe it or not.

I went from being a congressional staffer to working for the city of Everett and, the city of Everett's mayor at the time, Ed Hanson, had been, a long time aide in the office of Scoop Jackson.

And, so he hired me and kind of had me write my own job description to do both government affairs and communication.

And so as I worked for Everett, I started dealing a lot with issues at the state level and local legislators and working with other cities because, you know, you never take on issues in Olympia on your own or rarely.

So it's always better to build a village.

And so as I did this forever, it I started getting more and more interested in the work at the state level.

And my dad had been in in business many, many years for himself.

And, you know, I always had a a fondness for this notion of going into business for yourself.

And so in October 1999, I went from a, an employee of the city of Everett to a contract lobbyist for the city of Everett and a couple of other municipalities.

And, you know, lasted a quarter century.

Yeah.

Now I'm I'm guessing you it must have you did.

Well, because obviously that freed you up then to say, you know something?

I'm going to change again.

Talk a little bit.

What was that?

When did you come to that point, and how did you know that it was going to be taking a dive back into writing, back into a form of journalism and being an author that talk a little bit about that transition?

Sure.

Yeah.

Anybody who studies the Olympia scene closely knows that the job can be really rigorous.

So there were a lot of years working 90 to 100 hours a week.

And, and, and that begins to weigh on you.

And I always I always thought of myself as a writer.

You know, in, in the lobbying world, you're communicating your selling ideas and policies, but you have to have the written word foremost in mind.

So I knew that I, I, you know, at my core, I was a writer and I wanted to come back to that after a lot of years in the grind in Olympia.

And, you know, my wife, had a career with Microsoft and Amazon.

We both, you know, came to the conclusion in the early 2020s that we wanted to peel back.

And so at the end of 2022, she stopped working entirely, and I stopped doing any, Olympia based lobbying segue into a little bit of consulting.

But that was when I thought to myself, I've, I've always wanted to write a book.

More importantly, I told my mom back in 2015 I was going to write a book.

And, you know, when you tell your mom you're going to do something, you're you're best off doing it.

And so that was when I started thinking about, writing a book.

And I'd, I'd had ideas kind of connected to the Olympics for many years.

I'm just an Olympics junkie, and I'm still a sports fan at heart.

And that was when I started latching on to the ideas that led to Hero Redefined.

Prior to that, as that book came about, talk a little bit about the publishing world.

It seems you can be self-published, get a smaller independent publishing company, or if you're a big national name, you get the big publisher that comes in and puts you on the National Press Store.

You kind of landed in the middle, give me publishing 101, if you would, of the pros and cons and how and and how a person finds themselves in what slot.

Absolutely.

And there's a great Tacoma connection to this story, by the way.

So, you know, in the old days, in order to get a book published, you had to go through the random houses, the Penguin Publishing, the the big guys and gals, New York and, yeah, New York based.

And that was the way it was going to happen or not.

And then, you know, other, other formulas started creeping up and hybrids came along.

And one of them that I was, connected to is a Seattle based company called Girl Friday Productions.

The Tacoma connection here is that Jerry pug.

Netty had worked with Girl Friday Productions, Jerry's niece.

And I had been in the lobbying world together, and she said, I want you to have lunch with Jerry.

You know, I talked to him about your book and the outline of it, and he's excited about it.

And so I took my outline and my ideas to Mcmenamins in Tacoma for lunch with Jerry Pugnacity.

And.

Okay, he said, I really love this firm Girl Friday Productions, and I want to talk to them about you.

I really like your outline.

That sounds like a really interesting book.

And that's how it all started.

And, you know, back to your initial question.

Girl Friday Productions is in that middle.

Yeah.

Zone where they will take you all the way from a raw manuscript up to the point of publication.

It's your book, and you're the publisher technically at the end, but, you know, they get you there.

And, and that worked out very well.

One of the questions that generated for me was, who is managing your press?

And your publicity tour because you it hasn't been a guy who's been self-published going, you know, down the street to sign books at Home Depot.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

You've been on a I mean, you have been all over everywhere on a very robust trip.

Did you set that up using kind of your lobbying skills?

Was it the publisher?

Who got you all that you appear to have gotten for this book?

The the firm of me, myself and I. Okay, this I, you know, I'm I'm.

You should go to that business.

I'm fortunate in that I have a communications and press secretary background.

And so the notion of reaching out to the media, reaching out to bookstores, that felt like a comfort zone for me.

You know, obviously, you know, you do the best you can, but writing, a news release about my book being published and reaching out to bookstores that are connected to where these athletes were from, those things all felt pretty natural.

There were plenty of other things that didn't in the book writing process, but that one has felt okay to me.

So let's talk about the book Hero Redefined.

Why the Olympics?

Which I do get because I'm kind of an Olympics junkie, too.

So what?

But for you, why the Olympics?

And, what do you think that the, underlying premise is of all these 13 stories that are told in that book?

So I, I, I went to the Olympics because I think I mentioned earlier, I call myself an Olympics junkie, but what I love about the Olympics is it's one of those rare times where you can get everybody from around the world to a common place for good reasons.

We don't have too many of those.

And I, in the introduction of the book, you know, I quoted something that, you know, the great George Raveling had said to me, the old Washington State coach that, you know, it's it's the only time you can represent your country and not have to carry a gun.

And, you know, unfortunately and tragically, you know, we see that so much.

And so the Olympics, when done right and it's not always done right, but when done right, is a great gathering place.

And, and people around the world just trying to do their very best to represent their country so that was one theme that really appealed to me.

And then the other one is that I find in our society, I get caught up in this too.

We love winners, we love, and in the Olympics we love those men and women standing on the medal stand.

And we should.

I mean, if you don't love Simone Biles and Michael Phelps and Mikaela Shiffrin, you know, you probably have a screw loose.

I mean, they're they're terrific.

And they deserve all that adulation.

Here comes the but but that's the but there's so many other stories there and I, I always thought about that.

And there were some, you know, athletes that it sort of captured my attention over the years.

And I thought, maybe there's a story there.

I don't want to step on your book.

But give me 1 or 2 of your favorite stories, the one that you, on your massive press tour that you tell or asked to tell about consistently.

What are a couple of the real highlights in here to give people a flavor?

Okay, there's two part answer here.

You're making me choose between my kids.

You know, you know, these athletes.

But I will tell you that the two athletes that really triggered this whole idea for me, one was, a marathon runner named Gabrielle Anderson.

She.

Yes.

And she ran for her native Switzerland, in the first ever women's Olympic marathon in 1984.

That sounds crazy to talk about.

Yeah, it being 1984 until we thought women were okay to run marathons.

But she ran in that marathon.

She was pretty old for an Olympian.

She was 39.

A very good runner and a very good athlete who thought she was top ten, top 15 material.

Didn't think she was going to be a winner of that event.

Running.

Well, but then she ran headlong into all these things that tend to happen in Los Angeles, you know, heat, smog.

And then on that day, uncharacteristic humidity and, you know, when we run today, we all of us Americans, citizens around the world, if you do A5K, a ten K, there's water stations everywhere.

Yep.

But in 1984, believe it or not, there were only five water stations for that first women's on pick marathon.

Only five for the men too, by the way.

And so, you know, we weren't as prepared as a society to, to, to cater to these athletes.

Gabrielle, for reasons she can't even explain, missed the last water station, got extremely dehydrated.

And she enters the LA Olympic Stadium in a state where people are alarmed about her health, maybe alarmed about whether she was going to live or die and somehow half crawl, half walk, half stagger.

She gets through that last lap.

Plus I can still see it in my head.

Yeah.

If you look up the video on her, it's it's astonishing.

And that was always planted in my brain.

That was one to answer.

Your question.

The other was that I had read about this United States relay runner.

His name is Manteo Mitchell.

And in 2012, in London, he was privileged to lead off the 4x4 hundred relay for the USA men.

And it was a semifinal and he was blasting off doing great.

And then at 200m he hears this audible pop and he knows that something is really wrong.

But he's a relay runner.

He's the first of four.

He's got a guy on the jumbotron saying, come on, come on.

And so what does he do?

You know, I, I don't want to give a spoiler alert here, but he's only got a nanosecond to figure out how he's going to handle this.

And that was incredible to me when I read about it.

And it was one of those things and just small agate type, you know, page eight of the sports section or something.

I thought, oh, man, that's what a story.

Yeah.

So I those were in the back of my brain for many years.

And, and when I came back to this and started researching the athletes, I knew those were going to be two of them.

If if they would say yes to me and both of them fortunately did.

Now that you have to travel the world to get face to face with these people, or did you do zoom and some phone calls?

How did you manage it and how long did that process take?

Well, I guess we don't think of Covid as offering us many blessings, right?

But one of the things Covid did teach us is that, we didn't always have to be face to face in the workplace.

And so the whole emergence of zoom was huge for me.

And doing this book, most of the interviews were by zoom.

There was one exception, and that was, my wife and I had already arranged to go to Tanzania.

We'd always wanted to go to Africa and view the wildlife up close.

And, one of the athletes I wanted to profile in the book was a Tanzanian marathoner, named John Steven.

A quarry.

And that was an in-person interview with a translator.

But most of them, Tom, were just, by zoom, which, you know, I'm very fortunate to be able to report.

Let's talk a little bit about the role of the athlete in American society.

You know, the people want them to be role models.

We seem to be shocked and disappointed when they turn out to be domestic abusers or drug abusers or whatever it may be.

But, you know, if you've got a lot of yards or a lot of home runs or, you know, pick your sport, a lot of goals, you're a star.

And that's hard to live up to.

Yeah.

So how have you or how do you think we as a society should maybe take some of the lessons from your book in a perfect world, if you were a king, how would we redefine hero when it comes to sports hero?

Yeah, that was one of the central themes where I really wanted to push people little bit, to say, you know, what you think is the the hero on TV is in some senses, but peel back the onion a couple layers and you'll find some acts of dedication and sacrifice and sportsmanship and standing up for human rights.

And they're they're replete in every Olympic game.

So let's find some of those stories and tell them.

And then, you know, as I've gone out and talked to people and done interviews like this one, I always make a cross connection back to society.

It's not just the firefighter going into the burning building, you know, think about all these times of crisis in our country and around the world.

You find all these people doing incredible things just because it's the right thing to do.

And one of my core definitions of heroism is that the true heroes are the ones who don't think they are.

Yeah, you know, they're not doing this.

Yeah.

They find themselves oftentimes in research.

I'm thinking about the guy who disarmed the shooter on Bondi Beach in Australia.

He's standing there.

He doesn't know what's going on.

Before you know it, he is taking that guy on and disarming him.

Yeah, I mean, he that's that's not a play that he had.

Right.

Or even more subtly, you read about and you see footage about the woman who found a three year old that belonged to a couple.

That couple had two three year olds on the beach.

The dad found and covered one, took it, took her to safety, but they couldn't find their other daughter.

Well, a complete stranger covered.

Yeah.

The daughter.

Sorry.

And, that three year old little girl is alive today.

But that's.

And that's your emotional heroism, your emotion there, though, is unlocked, or I should say, demonstrates the power of story.

Yeah.

And telling these stories, because it's not.

Hey, he ran fast and won a gold and then went on to do endorsements.

Yeah, that's a fine story, right?

But it's the story behind the story that I think you were really tapping into.

And I think what, when I actually do sit down and read the entire book as opposed to bits and pieces of it, I think that's where the real power, I'll bet lies.

Yeah, I do too.

And I just, I will forever be grateful to all these athletes because for some of them, these are not their finest moments.

You know, some of the athletes in the book at the time, they didn't think it was a big deal.

You know, there's a British distance runner named David Moorcroft in this book, and David Moorcroft in 1982.

He steps on a track in Oslo.

And not only does he set a world record in the 5000m, he obliterates it.

He's talked about in Great Britain every bit as reverentially as Sebastian Coe and Steve Cram and Steve Ovett.

These are household names in distance running.

Two years later, he's really injured.

He's running in Los Angeles.

It's not going to happen for him.

But he was determined to finish his 5000 meter race.

One of his proudest things is that he never started a race that he didn't finish.

And there's quiet heroism there.

Yeah.

David Moore I've dealt with all the injuries and all the setbacks and said you know what I'm still going to finish.

And that gets to a word that comes up in your book I think in the description of it.

And I think you've even touched on this, that we talk a lot now or trying to talk a lot now in schools and with students and with kids with short attention spans and with the obstacles of life.

And that is resilience.

That resilience piece, I think it's so crucial to for society and for children and for people growing up and for parents to teach.

But it's also so clearly displayed in some of these stories.

No.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

There's there's sort of that DNA fiber with some of these athletes where they said, I am going to fight through all of the the torture that I'm dealing with and, and I'm going to get to my destination.

And I love that about these athletes.

And I love the athletes who just my gosh, they've dealt with some horrific injuries and medical setbacks.

And there's one athlete in the book who psychologically had the rug completely pulled out from under him, and he had to move on.

And those are those are your stories of getting past hurdles that I find fascinating.

I think I know the answer to this, but winter or summer?

Where where does your where does your heart lie?

I love them both.

I would have to say if you stuck me with the truth serum that I prefer summer, because I'm a, you know, I'm a bit of a track and field fanatic, having gone to University of Oregon, and I love seeing what those athletes do.

But I do love both.

And I'm, I'm just astounded by what some of these athletes do, knowing that there's not going to be this pot of gold at the other end of the rainbow.

The bobsledder is in The Losers.

We're about to watch in a month or so.

Incredible.

Yeah.

So let's talk a little bit about that.

The winter Olympics are coming.

Are you watching that with your notepad when you hear one of these sidebars and, and little Elsie Smith from Switzerland, you know, overcame childhood.

Leukemia to I can see writing that down.

And so what's next.

Is there a part two to this?

This seems like a gift that could keep on giving.

Although I'm sure you have other things you want to write about.

Yeah, I've been I, I've had that come up a lot.

Is there a sequel here?

I have other book ideas in my head from all parts of society.

I have one of the there's been two fun things that have come out of the book.

One is Girl Friday Productions helped build a website and encouraged me to do a regular blog.

I've been doing that, and I did do a blog about some of these unsung heroes from Paris that, you know, were, you know, past the point of my book publication.

But I have been doing that.

I probably will have that notepad to scribble.

But the other part is, by virtue of appearing on some podcasts and talking to podcast networks and programmers, I've, I've actually just started my own podcast, and it's very closely aligned with the book.

It's I call it under the radar Olympic athletes.

You got to me.

Okay.

So I, you know, just did one with a cross-country skier from Washington state named Novi McCabe.

No one's ever heard of no B McCabe.

But she's a wonderful cross-country skier who's done incredible things and isn't even 25 years old yet.

Yeah.

And, you know, I'll have others that will come before the Winter games.

So those two things have enabled me to sort of, I guess you'd say the gift that keeps on giving, I continue that storyline.

I think you and I, because of our backgrounds, really like the idea of writing a book, get my mind around a beginning, middle and end beginning middle times 13.

Got it.

Ever thought about writing the entire made of the great narrative?

Do you have the great American novel in you?

Do you think?

I have, a few other ideas that I feel really strongly about.

And so I at first, you know, I, I viewed book one is, a little bit like birthing the first child, you know, you just want to say it like that was a monumental task.

I'm done with it.

Don't ask me anything.

But I, you know, as you process this, I've thought I do have other stories in me I do want to tell them.

I don't know that any of them will fit the great American novel, but societally, I think there's some things where, I would like to express my voice.

Yeah, well, I hope that your instinct about, the Olympics and some of the stories about the Olympics being a unifying force in society in the world, you know, from your lips to God's ears.

Doug, thanks.

So much for coming to northwest.

Now, a great conversation about your book, Hero Redefined.

Thank you so much, Tom.

I've enjoyed it.

While I certainly have my complaints about modern Olympic Games coverage on television, the bottom line is that I love the Olympics, as do millions of other people.

Because of that, I'm putting Hero Redefined on my list of things to read when I could start reading for fun someday, instead of for work.

My thanks to Doug Levy for stopping by northwest now.

I hope this program got you thinking of talking.

You can find this program on the web at kbtc.org.

Stream it through the PBS app or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

That's going to do it for this edition of northwest.

Now, until next time, I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.

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