For USA climber Zach Hammer, opening ceremony cruise down Seine was 15 years in the making

PARIS — They cheered and they cried and they pinched themselves to make sure it was real, and as they watched for their son and brother to sail down the Seine on Team USA’s riverboat Friday, the family of 18-year-old climber Zach Hammer couldn’t have asked for a more perfect city to watch him kick off the Olympic Games.

Gary and Lisa Hammer got engaged in Paris 31 years ago in the Garden of Aphrodite at the Louvre.

They celebrated with a dinner at a restaurant on the banks of the river and brought their growing family back to Paris in 2009 for their 15th wedding anniversary.

Zach, 2 at the time, posed for pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower with his brother, Max, and sister, Maggie, and the family took a cruise down the Seine as their youngest son ran around repeating something incoherently he heard on the children’s show "Dragon Tales."

“It feels almost surreal that 15 years later we’re back for their 30th wedding anniversary watching Zach float down the same river, on a boat,” Maggie Hammer said. “It’s pretty wild.”

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On Friday, the Hammers (minus Max, who will join them later) watched the parade of nations carrying athletes from every country in this year’s Olympics float down the Seine from an elevated grandstand on the Pont de la Tournelle.

Tickets for the section cost nearly $1,000 each – far cheaper than other seats closer to the procession’s end, near the Eiffel Tower – and put the Hammers a few hundred yards from the restaurant where they celebrated their engagement three decades ago.

Zach is one of the youngest members of Team USA having graduated from Ann Arbor (Michigan) Skyline High earlier this year.

He’s perhaps the most unexpected member of the team’s eight-person climbing group, earning an Olympic bid with a late-season surge in two qualifying tournaments.

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“It’s been quite a journey,” Gary said. “A year ago, we didn’t know if we had a shot. We weren’t thinking about it. … We didn’t think Zach was going to make it. He’s young, and in the last year he exploded. He just, he kept getting better.”

Gary (at Vermont) and Lisa (at MIT) competed collegiately in gymnastics, and their children followed in their footsteps at an early age.

But Max, who’s seven years older than Zach, stumbled into a climbing gym next to his gymnastics facility one day when he was 11 and turned his attention almost instantly to the sport.

Maggie and Zach followed, and in the years since their parents became avid climbers, too.

Lisa confessed Friday she was happy her kids left the gymnastics world to pick up what was at the time a non-Olympic sport. She saw the dark side of gymnastics up close, when one of her teammates died of anorexia, and didn’t want her kids chasing a sport for the wrong reason.

“I don’t want Zach to just be achieving, to be striving for achievements,” Gary said. “Life’s not about a lifetime of achieving awards, it’s about doing things you love to do. And if you happen to love what you do and have a peak experience like this, ooh, you’re a lucky person.”

The Hammers spent more than six hours with USA TODAY on Friday, inviting a reporter to walk with them from their temporary residence in Paris at the home of a friend to the opening ceremony, which they watched with several hundred other screaming spectators on the bridge.

Team USA sailor Lara Dallman-Weiss’ parents and the parents of a water polo player from Team Japan also were on the bridge, though none of the families had ever met.

The Hammers, who will travel with Zach and the rest of the climbing team to Barcelona for five days of practice on Saturday, left their apartment around 3 p.m. for a ceremony that began more than four hours later.

They stopped twice for food along the way, not knowing how long the wait would be to wade through thousands of celebration-goers in the streets. They bought two pizzas, two pretzels and a yogurt, and Gary ordered a coppa and tomato sandwich at the first stop called “La Montagnard,” which translated – unbeknownst to him – means “The Mountain Man.”

Gary wore blue and silver tinsel in his hair and he and Maggie had red, white and blue sparkles on their face. All three wore Team USA shirts, and after a 40-minute wait, the group made it past armed security guards and metal detectors into the bridge area.

They sat in red seats in the third row of the grandstand and pulled out umbrellas and raincoats when it rained. They talked with other families sitting nearby, and Gary said he teared up at the start of the ceremony.

“I was just getting emotional about the Olympics, all peoples coming together in the world globally and that Zach was a part of that,” he said. “I think it was just the beginning of the music and I was getting a bunch of emails and texts saying how unreal it was, and then I realized it was real. And I was here, and Zach was a part of it. That was a powerful moment.”

A steady rain started around 5:30 p.m. and lasted well into the night, soaking everyone in attendance but not drenching anyone’s spirits.

Two women walked around in white gowns with “Team Croatia” embroidered on the back, a man in glasses draped a Mexican flag around his neck, and as the boats sailed down the river fans screamed and yelled and waved flags in every boat’s direction.

The Hammers followed Team USA’s boat by the Find My app on Zach’s phone, and they moved out of their seats to the front of the bridge as the boat approached. They couldn’t quite pick Zach out, but they cheered his name and knew he was there, soaking in another cruise down the Seine.

“It still hasn’t sunk in. We’re here. We’re walking to opening ceremonies and it still does not feel like real, like the Olympics,” Maggie said early in the night. “I’ve been telling literally everybody I know, whether they care or not. I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, my brother’s going to the Olympics.’ ”

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Follow Dave Birkett on social media @davebirkett.