Road to Torino

After years of craving it, he said, Jeremy Bloom has grown wary of fame.

"I've met some incredible people who have lost their sense of being and aren't real anymore," he said. "I looked at them and said, 'I'll never turn into someone like that.'"

Bloom said the need for humility first dawned on him when he tried to meet the Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong at the 2002 Olympics. Bloom had been inspired by Armstrong's book about beating cancer, but when a group of athletes tried to approach him, Armstrong "just blew us off," Bloom said.

At the ESPY Awards that year, Bloom tried to introduce himself to the N.B.A. player LeBron James, who walked away.

Those two incidents flipped a switch in Bloom's head. Bloom realized he should look up to someone like Pat Tillman, who had shunned the news media when he joined the Army.

"We've grown up around envy and celebrity, and he exemplified what you should hope to be," Bloom said. "I'm not a very emotional person, but I watched his funeral on TV, and I cried my eyes out."

from the New York Times: The Unbearable Lightness of Jeremy Bloom

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