Everybody's a winner

2004 International Children's Games bring world to Cleveland.

By:  Douglas J. Guth, Staff Reporter

As is traditional, the two teams of smiling teenage girls line up at the center of the basketball court to trade gifts. It's the first day of competition at the 2004 International Children's Games, and with their gracious gesture, these young athletes clearly embody the ideals of friendship and cultural exchange upon which the Games are built.

At least until the opening buzzer sounds. Like their contemporaries from around world, these girls are in it to win. They are the among 2,200 athletes, ages 12-15, from nearly 50 countries and 120 cities competing in the Games, held in Cleveland from July 30 to Aug. 2.

This game, a quarter-final matchup between Ramat-Hasharon, Israel, and Sentilj, Slovenia, quickly grows intense. Players from both teams dive for loose balls on the floor of Cleveland State University's Woodling Gym while their coaches stalk the baseline and shout instructions and encouragement in their respective languages.

Shir Wertheim, a lanky Israeli girl with braces and a mop of dark hair, receives a hard elbow from a Slovenian player while scrambling for a ball. She reacts by setting an equally hard (but completely legal) pick on the girl to free up teammate Aderet Salman, 14, Ramat-Hasharon's best and oldest player.

Aderet is quick and possesses a natural grace on the court. She drives to the hoop consistently. and with relative ease. But Slovenia's team is taller and more experienced, and ends up pulling away from the scrappy Israelis.

After the game is over, a few Israeli girls weep silently as Team Slovenia celebrates. Team Israel's coach, Paris-born Helene Degen, is proud of the effort. "This is a great experience for them," she says. "To see another kind of people and another style of game will only make them better."

Later, Aderet is eating lunch on the floor of a waiting area outside the basketball courts. The young Israeli has been playing basketball since she was 8. She views the Games as an opportunity to do some shopping and make new friends, "but we are all here to win," she admits.

This balance between hard-nosed competition and cultural exchange seems to be the status quo for the weekend. And what a weekend it is:

It begins at Cleveland Browns Stadium on an oppressively humid day topped by an overcast sky that promises rain. The delegations file in, waving flags and carrying signs bearing the names of their countries. The groups are as small as Ethiopia's two-boy squad and as large as Israel's 200-member contingent. The Israeli delegation is representing the cities of Beit She'an (Cleveland's Partnership 2000 city), Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ra'anana and Ramat Hasharon.

About two-thirds of the teens come from overseas, while the rest have made the journey from cities in the U.S. Team Cleveland boasts 112 athletes who will compete in all 10 available sports, including basketball, gymnastics, baseball and volleyball.

Presently, the crowd is abuzz as they wait for an address from President George W. Bush. Kids of all nationalities gleefully pose for pictures while others get interviewed by well-dressed anchors from local television stations. Still others, such as Team Germany, are wearing the native garb of their homeland.

Bush arrives, shaking hands with the athletes strung out across a protective railing. During his short speech, he gives special attention to the girls' soccer team from Kabul, Afghanistan. These girls, none of whom have played soccer before, spent the previous five weeks training in Connecticut. Their visit is sponsored by the Afghan Youth Sports Exchange, an organization that teaches Afghanistan's post-Taliban youths leadership skills in order to promote athletics at their schools.

After the president is quickly escorted out of the stadium, the procession to the Games' opening ceremony at Mall A downtown begins. Here, the world is shrunk into three blocks, as all three downtown malls, along with the nearby Cleveland Convention Center, is transformed for the weekend into an Olympic-style "festival village" with an outdoor market, ethnic food vendors, and live entertainment.

Games take place at John Carroll, Cleveland State and Case universities, where many of the students are also housed. Beachwood, Shaker Heights and Brush high schools also host competitions.

It takes an hour for the cheering, flag-waving young people to make the short trek from the stadium to Mall A.

Some kids from the Israeli delegation, including Ido Coren, Lian Friedman, Dana Eliaz and Rebecca Ross, are resting on some concrete steps leading up to the mall while they wait for the procession to move. While drinking bottled water to beat the heat, they tell this reporter about all the countries they have met so far - Mexico, India, Japan, Austria and Ethiopia.

"This is a very good opportunity for us," Ido declares. His friend Dana agrees. She is a guard on Jerusalem's girls' basketball team and looks forward to representing her country on the court. Along with sharing cultures with children from distant and intriguing lands, "this is a way to show pride for our country," she says.

Pride is indeed an important aspect of the Games, notes Nitza Melendez of Catano, Puerto Rico, who made the trip to watch her son, Gerardo, play on his country's water polo team. "We are a small country, but we have big hearts."

The opening ceremony begins as thousands of spectators, gathered on each side of a gated area, give high-fives to the young delegates as they are introduced by Olympic gold-medal gymnasts Nadia Comaneci and her husband, Bart Conner.

Each delegation hits the stage as a light drizzle begins to fall. Colorful fireworks explode overhead, giving brief illumination to the steadily darkening sky as rock music blares over large speakers. Cleveland police officers and other security officials roam the grounds, a few of them trailed by bomb-sniffing dogs.

The rain gets a little heavier as the ceremonies continue, but this doesn't stop the lighting of the ceremonial cauldron by five Cleveland teenagers carrying Olympic-style torches.

The delegation from County Mayo, Ireland, doesn't mind the rain either. "We're used to it," shrugs a bright-eyed young boy in a green tracksuit, referring to the inclement weather that comes with living in his country.

Team Ireland has been in Cleveland for a few days already, spending time at tourist attractions like Tower City, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Great Lakes Science Center. They say they are here mainly for "cultural reasons."

The downtown festival village, along with many of the sporting venues, serve as a trading post where athletes exchange pins, hats, jerseys and other keepsakes, even if they don't speak a word of the other person's language. This reporter, for example, witnessed children from Holland silently exchanging the wooden shoes reflective of their culture for forest-green jerseys worn by kids from Mexico.

Michaela Thompson, 15, a track-and-field participant from Coventry, England, is wearing a floppy blue-and-white hat from El Salvador.

"Some boy gave it to me," Michaela chirps. "He told me I have pretty eyes."

The opening night festivities continue with on-stage entertainment in the form of a 100-person Gospel choir, a troupe of young dancers, and 16-year-old pop star Aaron Carter.

Jamaine Donkor of England, who competes in track at the Blackheath Bluecoats Church of England School, is loving his first trip to the U.S. "There couldn't be a party like this anywhere else in the world right now," he enthuses.

Of course, you can't have a party without food. Vendors offer everything from pad thai to mula kari (curried fish balls) to fried banana caramel xango, a cheesecake dessert topped with caramel sauce. However, kids being kids, most of them seem to just go for the pizza.

Due to dietary restrictions, pizza was the food of choice for most Israelis. The John Carroll cafeteria had meat, "but we couldn't eat it; it wasn't kosher," says Rebecca Ross.

"They had vegetarian, but every day it was pasta, pasta, pasta," adds Noa Tzur, 15, of Jerusalem. The Israeli kids went out on Friday night but Noa, who is Sabbath-observant, couldn't go because they rode a bus. She and some of the other athletes stayed in and ordered pizza.

"Yeah, we ordered in a lot of pizza," says Rebecca.

Besides eating, the festival village offers a myriad of other activities. New York DJs spin hip-hop favorites such as Nelly and P. Diddy at Club Techno, a nonalcoholic dance club located in the convention center.

If the club scene isn't their thing, participants play Xbox video games or e-mail home at the Cyber Café. I play a car-racing game against a tousle-haired Brazilian boy. After he thrashed me, the boy, in the sportsmanship spirit of the weekend, says, "good game" and gives me a firm handshake.

The lower level of the convention center, meanwhile, houses Embassy Row, which has visual displays on the culture and traditions of about 20 countries, including India, Poland and Israel.

A Vietnamese man demonstrates a curved, wooden xylophone-like instrument to three girls from Lithuania. The instrument produces a lilting, distinctly Asian sound. "That's so cool," one of the girls says with unaffected awe.

As the festival goes on downtown, so do the sporting events elsewhere. The rains from the night before postpone some of Saturday's outdoor sporting events. Basketball and swimming, taking place in the same complex at CSU, are going strong when I arrive.

Swimmer Jennifer Aronoff, 14, of Shaker Heights has her family in the stands, including all four grandparents. She wins a bronze medal in the individual medley, an event that uses several different swimming strokes.

She also finishes in the top five in two other events, and makes friends with a swimmer from South Korea. The South Korean girl does not speak much English, so Jennifer uses hand gestures to communicate.

The two trade pins and caps, and the girl gives Jennifer her home address. "I'm going to send her a photograph we took together," says the young Clevelander.

Jennifer's mother, Karen, is happy to see her child blossoming socially. "She's a shy kid, but this weekend will do nothing but raise her confidence level" both in and out of the pool, she confides.

While the Aronoffs have a short car ride from Shaker Heights, other families undertake a much longer journey to see their children compete. County Mayo, Ireland residents Mai O'Neill and Marie Bourke, with their respective families in tow, are sitting in the stands of the CSU Natatorium with their national flag.

O'Neill's son, Rickie, is competing, along with Bourke's daughter, Aisling. Both families have paid their own way, but the expense has been worth it. "We'll just be on beans and toast for the next two years," jokes O'Neill.

Cleveland's various ethnic communities are part of the large crowds attending almost every event, a fact much appreciated by their visiting countrymen. Joo Hee Lee, captain of the South Korean girls' volleyball team, respectfully bows to the Korean contingent after leading her squad to a gold medal.

"The people here are nice and kind. the city is so clean," says Lee through an interpreter. "We would like to come back here as a tourist some day."

The outdoor sporting events resume on Sunday, which dawns hotter than the day before. Forest Hill Park in Cleveland Heights is the site of the Games' baseball tournament. Today, Team Cleveland is playing Newark, NJ, in front of a large crowd of supporters.

Team Cleveland falls behind early to the very vocal Newark team. A late comeback falls short, but Cleveland wins two games on the last day of the tournament to earn a silver medal.

First baseman/pitcher Elliot Rosenbaum of Beachwood, who pitches well and has a couple of hits during the tournament, counts those two big wins as his most memorable moments of the weekend.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience," observes Elliot, 15.

The baseball team from Daegu City, South Korea, was formed three months ago with kids who have very little baseball experience.

"The boys are excited to simply be out there playing," says Chul Won Shin, head of the Daegu City delegation. This morning they are playing the eventual gold-medal winning team from Glendale, Calif., and are being beaten badly.

No matter, says Shin, as both sides clap wildly when South Korea gets its first hit of the game, a double off the bat of Kim Yoon.

"This trip will give the kids a sense of how big the world is and how many people are living in it," Shin continues.

For the Israeli water polo team, the world is pretty much relegated to the pool at Case. Because of so many early morning matches, the team can't do as much socializing as they would like. They have been mostly hanging out in their dorm in the evenings.

"That's OK," says Ido Coren. The dorms are co-ed, so there are plenty of "good girls" to talk to, he says.

Ido's team finishes seventh after defeating a team from Kitchner, Ontario. Team Israel has been playing together for about two years, and the Games, they say, are the biggest event they've ever competed in.

During their visit, the Israeli delegation met with Mayor Jane Campbell and other local leaders. On Aug. 3, the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland hosted a "Picnic in the Park" at the Mandel Jewish Community Center featuring the young Israelis, after they had spent the day at Camp Wise.

All in all, "we were treated like kings," says water-polo player Daniel Lungu.

The Games' activities wrap up late Monday afternoon with a medal ceremony. Mayor Campbell and U.S. Reps Dennis Kucinich and Stephanie Tubbs Jones join Games' representatives in handing out hundreds of gold, silver and bronze medals for the competitions.

Team Cleveland fares well, earning gold medals in girls' basketball and gymnastics, silver in baseball, and bronze in boys' basketball and girls' soccer. Gymnast Bianca Flohr of Cuyahoga Heights wins five gold medals all by herself. The girls on Afghanistan's soccer team do not win a medal, but are given the Heart Award in acknowledgement if their courage and passion.

"Northeast Ohio got to have some Olympic flavor in its own backyard," remarks Matt Ghaffari, an Iranian-born, medal-winning heavyweight Olympic wrestler, one of a half dozen or so former Olympic participants on hand for the Games.

Ghaffari congratulates Cleveland for hosting the successful event, and says this could open the door for other amateur sporting events in Cleveland, including the Pan American Games.

The event could create future business opportunities for the city, as well. As foreign immigration fuels population growth in prosperous American cities, perhaps Cleveland's hospitality will attract these motivated young athletes to settle here one day.

But that is a thought for the future, because these kids are enjoying the "now." As the blazing sun lowers and the ceremonies wind down, the athletes exchange more keepsakes while signing each other's T-shirts. Others, whose youthful exuberance is in temporary hibernation, nap in the shade or against a friend's supportive shoulder.

The weekend has gone well, with no arrests reported in association with the Games. The only complaints, say officials, are the rain and a lack of seating at some of the sporting venues.

The torch is extinguished and the Games are closed at 7:42 p.m. Carol Payto, program director for the festivities, is a little bummed that the Games are over. She wants the good feeling that came through this weekend to become a springboard for the future.

A wrap-up book and DVD on the Games is already in the works. They will be used to bring other events to town. "Cleveland is a hidden gem," says Payto. "We really showed what we can do."