Rachel Axon learned her love of sports through the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres. This month she is covering the Beijing Games for USA Today. Some Olympic athletes warned her ahead of time how cold it can be on the mountain at Zhangjiakou. She didn’t worry.
Then she got there.
“The cold here is no joke,” she tweeted the other day. “I might live in Florida, but I am from Buffalo and this is my third Winter Olympics. I know cold, and still this is beyond anything I have ever experienced.”
Axon, 37, wears a thermal coat and snow pants over layers that include a heated vest. She has hand warmers and good boots. But when she saw the wind farm not far from the mountain venues, she realized this is a place that puts the chill into wind chill. As we spoke by phone this week, the temperature there was minus-13 degrees Fahrenheit — and the wind chill minus-29.
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“I think I have held up pretty well,” she said cheerily. That understates the matter considerably: Rachel is without peer covering snowboarding and freestyle skiing. Athletes with names you know — Shaun White, Chloe Kim, Eileen Gu — know hers.
She grew up as Rachel George in Wyoming County. Her earliest sports memory, circa 1991 is of her mother’s hair dyed in Bills colors for the AFC championship game that got the Bills to their first Super Bowl. Some years later her mother placed a two-hour limit on Rachel’s daily consumption of SportsCenter. By high school, at Pioneer Central, she kept color-coded notebooks of statistics for the Sabres team that reached 1999’s Stanley Cup finals.
“Obsessed is probably not a strong enough word” for her fandom then, she said. “I guess I was in high school when I thought, ‘Oh, maybe this is something I could do as a job.’ ”
Her home, in Arcade, was about 35 miles north of St. Bonaventure. One day her mother took her to Olean for a double-dip: Rachel took her driver’s test and visited campus. The day was a success on both counts. She got her license — and her school.
“I talked to Bonaventure, and obviously they have a great journalism program and a long track record of notable sportswriters,” she said. “So I could sort of see the path.”
Her path included internships at The Buffalo News and the Olean Times Herald. Rachel recalls that reporters at The News who went out of their way to help her included Mark Gaughan, Mike Harrington, Amy Moritz and Keith McShea. Chuck Pollock, sports editor of the Times Herald, remembers her arriving with a portfolio of her work encased in a binder, each story in its own plastic sheaf.
Axon’s first journalism job came at the StarNews, in Wilmington, N.C., where she covered high school sports. It is an entry-level beat that typically entails writing game stories and features, but she dug deeper. Her series on dangerous conditions at a fieldhouse used for high school sports resulted in the county's condemning it and spending $756,000 for renovations. In the Associated Press Sports Editors’ 2009 writing contest, she won first place for investigative reporting. Editors at regional and national newspapers took notice.
The Orlando Sentinel hired her, in 2010, to cover sports at the University of Florida. USA Today came calling two years later. She and her husband, Joel Axon, still live in Gainesville, Fla. And today she is a member of USA Today’s I-Team as an investigative reporter who focuses mainly on sports while working on other projects as well. She was part of a team that produced an award-winning, pandemic-era series on the exploitation of migrants in the meatpacking industry. And she has reported extensively on sexual abuse in the U.S. Olympic movement and sexual assault on college campuses.
As it happens, Rachel and I were colleagues at USA Today for several years. We did not meet in person until then, but we had spoken by phone a number of times when she was a senior at St. Bonaventure. That was thanks to John Hanchette, one of her journalism professors there. He was one of the original reporters at USA Today, who greeted me on my first day there, in 1982, after the Courier-Express had closed the same week that USA Today opened.
When at last I retired — three years ago, as the last member of USA Today’s founding generation — Rachel sent this email: “You can’t know what your kindness meant to a college kid who wanted to interview you for her honors thesis. I’ve never forgotten it, and I’m doing my best to pay it forward.”
Rachel is the girl from Arcade with the color-coded notebooks who found her path at St. Bonaventure and followed it to a mountaintop in China.
It is cold on the mountain, very cold. But knowing she is there warms my heart.
