For 16 days this August, the collective eyes of the world were focused on Beijing and the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. K-State students and faculty watched television coverage of events as they enjoyed their last free days before the fall semester, which began the day after the Games’ closing ceremonies.
   
Only one K-State student’s devotion to the festivities made him a week late to class, but with the stories he had to tell, none of his professors minded.
   
Stewart Lane, senior in hotel and restaurant management, spent a month in China working as a chef at the USA House, which provided food to Olympic athletes and their coaches, trainers and family members, as well as  to members of the U.S. Olympic team delegation.
   
Though cooking for the U.S. Olympic team is hardly a standard college internship, the work itself came naturally to the Kansas City, Mo., native.
   
“I’ve been in the food world my entire life,” Lane said.
   
Lane’s parents started their catering business when he was 5 years old, and he has traveled with them to many trade shows sponsored by the International Caterers Association. It was at one of those shows in 2004 that he met Frank Puleo, owner of New York-based Catering by Framboise, which has held the catering contract for the U.S. Olympic team for more than 10 years.
   
“I struck up a friendship with [Puleo] and he invited me out to the Torino Games, but the Winter Olympics are in the middle of school, so that wouldn’t have worked,” Lane said. “Then he was like, ‘Well, what about Beijing?’ I was a senior in high school, so I said, ‘Sure, see you in four years.’
   
“Then, about half a year before [the 2008 Games], I started talking to him again about Beijing. I said, ‘Hey, I’d really like to do this,’ and he said, ‘Sure. It’s done.’”
   
When Lane left for the Games, he packed only his one-year tourist visa, clothes and personal knives, which led to some miscommunication as he went through security on commercial airlines for the 16-hour flight. Once he arrived in Beijing, he and the rest of the kitchen staff took over a four-story restaurant called Jasmine, replacing its furnishings with white block furniture purchased from IKEA by the U.S. Olympic delegation.
   
“When we were done, [the delegation] bubble-wrapped the furniture without dismantling it and shipped it to Vancouver for the next Games, because everything is used for two Olympics,” Lane said.
   
The kitchen staff lived in dormitories at Beijing Normal University and traveled by taxi every day to the USA House, which was next to the soccer stadium. Lane had three days off during the month and used them to watch ping-pong, shooting, men’s water polo, women’s wrestling and men’s beach volleyball, which he called his favorite event by far.
   
“The match was USA vs. Germany,” he said. “There were USA chants and an entire section in orange cheering for Deutschland — it was just awesome.”
   
Though being close to many events was exciting, Lane said no one on the staff came primarily to sit around and watch the Games.
   
“We were told this beautiful vision of what it would be — ‘You’ll work four days on and have one day off, you won’t work anymore than 8-10 hours a day’ — but we all knew it wasn’t going to be that way,” he said, citing an eight-day period during which he worked 113 hours.
   
Lane worked in both U.S. kitchens, which were housed in separate buildings. Staff prepared meals to athletes’ specifications at the high-performance training center and family members and dignitaries were served at the USA House, where Lane spent most of his time with 10 other American workers and six Chinese chefs who worked at Jasmine and agreed to help the U.S. delegation.
   
The K-State chef said the number of people served varied from day to day — “depending on how many people won gold medals” — with a high of 1,200 people being served on the day of the opening ceremonies.
   
The 80-90 American kitchen workers came from diverse backgrounds, with hotel chefs from large cities like Chicago, caterers for NASCAR and PGA Tour events and culinary school students from Sullivan University in Louisville, Ky. Lane said though the team generally worked well together, working with that many different people from across the country inevitably created tension.
   
“You get egos and attitudes and work long hours together, and people are bound to snap,” he said.
   
Though the hours were long and tempers flared at times, working in USA House did have some celebrity perks, as Lane met former President George H.W. Bush, Katie Couric and Vince Vaughn, among others. He also received a USA Olympics bracelet from record-setting swimmer Michael Phelps after he teamed with kitchen staff to honor a request for chocolate milk.
   
“One day we didn’t have any, but we knew we had to do something special for him, so we threw together some sugar, vanilla and cocoa powder and mixed it in with milk,” Lane said.
   
“[Phelps] tried it and said, ‘It’s not my original, but it’s all right.’ He thanked us, gave us some pins and gave one of my friends and me this bracelet,” which Lane said he is trying to protect but wears occasionally as a conversation-starter.
   
Lane had his share of memorable experiences but said his confidence received a large boost from working under pressure in an unfamiliar culture.
   
“When I went over there, I was so nervous that I was going to screw this up,” he said. “I was so freaked out, like ‘Why am I going over there?’ but when I got there, I realized I could do this and I could fall in and get things done.
   
“That was probably the greatest thing for me — knowing that I can be put in that stressful situation and succeed and do well in it.”
   
Lane will graduate in December, and though he is weighing employment options back home, as well as in Manhattan and Lawrence, and contemplating plans of operating a restaurant or catering business, he has no reservations about his Olympic future.
   
“Oh, I’d love to work another Olympics,” he said. “I’d love to go to Vancouver and the next round after that is London, then Russia, then Chicago or Rio [de Janeiro], which would be awesome to go to Rio,” he said, eyes lighting up.
   
“Now I’ve got a line in, and they’re already working on [the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver], so I’m excited.”

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