This column appeared in the Arizona Daily Sun on Aug. 12, 2004.

An Olympic journey for the ages

By Ed Odeven

You will be bombarded with human-interest story after human-interest story for the next 16 days. It happens every Olympiad. This is the downside of having countless hours of TV coverage.

How many of these stories will you actually remember? Five, maybe 10. It’s mind-numbing overexposure.

Well, my friends, this story isn’t one of those dime-a-dozen, force-it-down-your-throat stories. Nope. Not by any stretch of the imagination. This, I believe, just might be the most fascinating — or certainly in the top one percentile — of all stories associated with the 2004 Athens Games.

This is one woman’s remarkable journey of Olympic discovery. It began in India in April 2003 and ended in Ghana in May 2004. In between, Greek Cypriot photographer Marina Shacola visited 25 countries on five continents —…