Many people find themselves steeped in the stories of U.S. Olympic athletes every two years.

As a collections management specialist at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, Katherine Latona spends every day immersed in the artifacts, athlete stories and history of the ancient games.

“When I first got hired, I was like is this real?” Latona said. “But you go through a process of desensitization, which is for the good, because sometimes at the beginning, you’re so scared of touching anything — it’s so precious. But then you become more comfortable because it’s better for the materials if you are more self-assured.”

As she maneuvers through the aisles and cubbyholes of the Crawford Family U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Archives, where about 15,000 artifacts live at the USOPC headquarters in downtown Colorado Springs, Latona is a walking archive herself.

She dips into her endless well of colorful anecdotes about decorated athletes and revels in the stories of unusual historical games. Her enthusiasm is contagious. Though she didn’t arrive at the USOPC in 2019 as an Olympics expert, her passion for the niche clearly continues to grow.

“I wasn’t a super fan, so there was a steep learning curve,” she said. “But it was good because having that outside perspective helped me relate to the materials differently and share those connections with people.”

It was a twisty trail, pocked with obstacles, to where she is today, the start of which began in Bogotá, Colombia, where she was born and spent most of her formative years, before moving to the U.S. with her parents when she was 18.

They wound up separating, and she moved to Durham, N.C., with her father, where she finished high school while working part-time and caring for him during health challenges.

Through the luck of a lottery system, she got into Durham School of the Arts, where she explored her creativity, but moving to the U.S. came at a cost.

“Because I went to bilingual schools and my dad was American and always spoke to me in English, the language wasn’t as much of a barrier,” she said. “The biggest thing for me was to be a sheltered preppy girl in Latin America and come here as an immigrant, underprivileged and under-resourced. That was a crazy adjustment for me. It was also a huge motivator for me to make things happen.”

And she did, even though teachers and counselors weren’t always supportive.

“A guidance counselor nudged me to drop out and pursue my GED instead,” Latona said. “The undertone was because I was Latino, and I wasn’t going to amount to much. School is my life. There is no option. I didn’t listen.”

After graduation, she married her high school boyfriend, who enlisted in the U.S. Army, and was stationed at Fort Carson. She wanted to study architecture, but because there weren’t any architecture schools in the area, she went to what’s now Pikes Peak State College and earned an associate degree in art history, before graduating from University of Colorado Colorado Springs in 2018 with a bachelor’s in art history.

She has since divorced, and her father died in the fall.

“She’s succeeded against all odds,” said Carol Boren, who served as Latona’s mentor while she studied at UCCS. “She had a husband who was non-supportive and difficult, which was not helpful. She was carrying the burden of her father, who was ill and difficult. That takes a lot of determination and courage, time, frustration and disappointment. To overcome those kinds of situations, not all women are able to do that.”

The archives

Named after Olympic super-collector Gordy Crawford, the Olympic archives were originally located in the basement of the Olympic Shooting Center at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center. But when Crawford wanted to donate his collection of torches and medals, he found the space unsafe as an archive. So he donated over $1 million to build the state-of-the-art facility in the downtown USOPC building. The collection was moved into its new space in 2014.

The collection has three branches: manuscripts, which include meeting minutes, athlete files and other organizational knowledge; photos and digital materials; and the artifacts, which is anything 3-D. The latter is Latona’s area.

“My babies,” she said.

She processes new donations; ensures the preservation of the materials; designs and curates exhibits around the building and Olympic training center; and helps with loans of the artifacts to fellow Olympic entities, historical institutions and other organizations.

Her job allows her to indulge in one of her main fascinations — ancient Greece and Rome, both tied to the antiquity of the Olympic Games. Working with artifacts, like the piece of rock from the Acropolis in Greece donated to the archives by the Greek Olympic committee, is surreal.

“I’m more based on how these materials reflect what was going on in the world at the time,” Latona said. “Or what does it mean on a more personal level? Connecting to the individual athlete’s story is where I get the most joy and connection.”

One of those athletes is Wilma Rudolph, a track and field superstar who competed in the 1956 and 1960 Olympic Games, and was the fastest woman in the world at the time.

“She had Scarlet fever, double pneumonia, and overcame a wild amount of challenges and then became a superstar athlete,” Latona said. “Having the privilege to safeguard and share those stories with people is amazing.”

Another favorite collection was donated by the wife of Anthony Zahn, a bronze medal-winning Paralympic cyclist who died from pancreatic cancer in 2020.

“He’s not a superstar, but he’s special because he was such a collector,” she said. “He even kept the tailoring ticket for his opening ceremony pants. I processed that whole collection, and by the end, I felt like I knew him. There’s a special display out there, and his wife comes and visits now and then. I finally got to meet her two or three months ago. It was a huge privilege.”

And then there’s the sword.

“One of my favorite things about the Olympic world is there’s a tradition of gift-giving among the different international committees during the games,” Latona said. “This was a gift from the British Olympic Committee during the Salt Lake 2002 Winter Games. They presented us with this gift since we were the hosting nation. It’s a sword of peace.”

Working at the archives is like a perpetual Christmas for Latona, when boxes of memorabilia, donated by athletes, their families or fans, land at their office. She dives in, sorts through the goodies, casts aside objects they already have enough copies of in their collection, and focuses on one-of-a-kind pieces.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s a pin, a torch, a medal or a cycling suit,” she said. “It all gets the same amount of attention.”

About 300 of the archive’s artifacts are on display at the nearby U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum that opened in 2020. She was initially hired as a contractor to help prep materials for the museum displays, even getting to select a few of the pieces herself, and was hired full-time in 2021.

“She’s in a much better place now,” Boren said. “She graduated magna cum laude despite all the circumstances she was living in. She could have just given up. She has so much going for her.”