Reporting on the Olympic champions
BY DUSAN VUKSANOVIC
In August 2007, as I was boarding my flight to Munich in Belgrade, I saw that I would be sharing the same plane with the Serbian national volleyball team. I was transfixed, and my eyes stared at my most favorite athlete of all times – Ivan Miljkovic, the man who scored the last point in the 2000 Olympic final against Russian Federation, and brought Yugoslavia its first-ever Olympic volleyball gold. Excited like a child over a chocolate ice cream, I rushed to him and asked if he could sign my boarding pass. He did! Exactly a year later, I was interviewing him for FOX Television in Serbia as a part of my journalism internship.
The opportunity for the job came from out of the blue. A friend of mine told me about a summer position and requested that I send her my résumé if I was interested in it. A month and a half later, I was called in for an interview, and after having talked to people at FOX, I was told on the spot to come the next day so that I could begin the training.
After spending a week in the newsroom learning how the news were made and produced, I was given my first assignment – shoot and make a 90-second coverage on European Wakeboarding Cup. The task was literally a baptism of fire, because I had to do the research and the write-up for the coverage at the event, since no information was available online. After conducting several interviews with both the organizers and the athletes, and instructing the cameraman what to film, I felt confident about the story.
I finished writing the text for the voiceover on the way back to the studio. With only 25 minutes before the beginning of the news, my boss told me that he wanted a 30-second clip rather than a 90-second one. Striking out all the cool interviews with athletes from Germany and Great Britain and several very interesting pieces of information, I managed to produce the clip in 10 minutes.
From that point on, I got to cover some amazing sport events. The most memorable ones were the three volleyball World League games in Belgrade in which Serbia played against Brazil, Venezuela, and France respectively. I’ll never forget the game against Brazil when I walked into the journalists’ section of the stadium. The entire stadium was packed with approximately 10,000 people, some even sitting on the stairs because they couldn’t find any other place. And I had the best seats in the house, with only the commercials separating me from the playing field. I’ll also never forget the first time when I heard my national anthem, God of Justice, being sung by all the people in the crowd. The upper third of the crowd in the arena held red banners, the middle one blue, and the bottom one white, making the whole stadium look like the Serbian national flag. This was before the game against France, the same one after which I interviewed Miljkovic. The boarding pass that he signed for me a year before was in my wallet with me that night. I still carry it around! Serbia won that game 3-1, and qualified for the Final Six tournament in Rio de Janeiro.
Other interesting memories include reporting on Taekwondo College World Championships, European Junior Swimming Championship, and the Serbian national water polo team’s last practice in Belgrade, which was two weeks before Beijing Olympics. For the latter, I interviewed head coach Dejan Udovicic and center Dejan Savic. The Serbian water polo team ended up winning a bronze medal in Beijing.
The internship at FOX provided me with priceless skills and an unbelievable experience to work with the best sports journalists in Serbia and meet possibly some of the best athletes in the world. The summer of 2008 was definitely one I’ll never forget.
Short URL: http://www.themountaineer.org/?p=391
Posted by Dusan Vuksanovic
on Mar 3, 2009 Filed under Athletics.
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