Newsmakers

  • By ABC's Elizabeth Hartfield

    To an outside observer, Athens, Greece would appear to be the obvious pick for the summer Olympics. But getting a winning bid for the country where the games originated was actually a lot more difficult, writes Gianna Angelopoulos, who headed up the committee that oversaw Greece's bid, in her book "My Greek Drama."

    In 1996 when Angelopoulos was appointed to head up the committee, she went into the process assuming the same position as any other country, instead of approaching it as though it was the country's right of passage.

    "We wanted to win by merit" she told ABC's George Stephanopoulos, "not by right."

    Angelopoulos, a former member of Greece's Parliament and the former employer of ABC's multi-platform anchor during the Olympic bid, writes about the highs and lows of her Olympic journey in her book, which was released in May, 2013: Covering Greece's struggle to bring the Olympics back to the country-- which had not hosted the event since 1896--- to get them

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  • 80-Year-Old Yuichiro Miura’s Weight-loss Strategy: Climb Mount Everest

    By Akiko Fujita, Mary-Rose Abraham and Ben Schellpfeffer | Newsmakers – Tue, Jun 4, 2013

    Climber Yuichiro Miura’s passion for mountaineering began with a simple desire – to lose weight.

    At 60 years old, Miura was better known as a daredevil skier. He had skied down the world’s seven highest peaks, including Mount Everest, but had no real experience scaling them.

    “After retiring, I was a little bored with nothing to do and got fat,” Miura said. “I thought, if a 60-year-old metabolic fat man, after five years, can get to Mount Everest, that would be very exciting.”

    Miura started small. He climbed a 1,640-foot mountain in Sapporo first, then took on Mount Fuji, six times.

    He trained by walking in Tokyo every day, wearing 11-pound weights on each ankle, and 44 pounds on his shoulder.

    It took 10 years, but Miura successfully reached the summit of Everest at 70 years old with his son Gota, an Olympic skier, by his side. The 2003 trip coincided with the 50th anniversary of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s climb -- they were the first to reach the world’s highest peak.

    “The

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