Rufaro Faith Mazarura: Why I wrote a Campus Novel set at the Olympics
It’s 10 am in the middle of the summer and a 22-year-old is crying because they’ve just failed an exam. An 18-year-old is on the phone to their mentor because they’re about to make the biggest decision of their life. A 24-year-old is considering whether it’s time to retire and a 21-year-old is about to have a day that changes the trajectory of their life. But these scenes aren’t playing out at a university campus in the middle of exam season, these scenes are playing out in the Olympic Village, which in a way is like a university campus.
I remember watching the London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in awe. My parents hosted a watch party when the Summer Games landed in the UK twelve years ago and I spent the entire three hours watching the ceremony curious about the athletes whose entire lives revolved around competing in world-class sports. When the Tokyo 2021 Olympics rolled around, I found myself spending hours trying to figure out what the Games looked like behind the scenes. The more I watched athletes do Q&As, video diaries and TikTok’s about their life inside the Olympic Village, the more fascinated I became not just with the Olympics but the culture within the Village.
As an outsider to both the world of high-level sports and the Olympics, I expected to find detailed descriptions of intense training regimens, strict diets and long days spent preparing for competitions. And I did, but what I also found was stories about what Village life was like behind closed doors. Wild parties in athletes’ apartments at the Beijing Games, long lines to get free McDonald’s in Rio, cardboard beds in the Tokyo Village and eyebrow-raising stories from the London Olympics.
The parties held and cross-continental friendships made amidst the high stakes and intense competition of The Games fascinated me. The athletes were training for the most important competitions of their lives and experiencing an event that could mark the peak of their careers. But they were also spending a summer in a contained environment with thousands of incredibly athletic, good-looking, successful people from every corner of the world. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that the Olympic Village was kind of like an incredibly international University campus, so I decided to write a romcom set at the Olympics in a similar style to a Campus Novel.
Once I’d decided on a location – one summer in Athens – the rest of the story quickly fell into place. I decided to follow two characters on very different ends of the Olympic/Campus social hierarchy. First came Zeke, the star sprinter of Team GB who plays a sort of Big Name on Campus role in the Village as a charming, multi-medal-winning leading male character. Then came Olivia, the fresh grad turned Olympic intern who plays the model UN president/class valedictorian role as the witty, ambitious, no-nonsense female lead. It’s a dynamic I’ve seen in so many stories I love set on school and university campuses. However, writing it within the aspirational setting of the Olympics made the stakes higher and the thrill of a romance even more exciting.
A lot of ‘coming of age’ moments happen during our teenage years because it’s a time filled with firsts. But if we spend our teens wondering who we will become, our early and mid-twenties are the time when we start to feel the real consequences of our first set of adult decisions. I love how New Adult novels explore that in stories about people in their twenties moving to big cities for post-graduation jobs and forming new friendships. How they explore the obstacles that come with growing up and realising your life is now completely your own responsibility. So, like any good campus novel characters, I filled both Olivia and Zeke’s lives with the kind of worries and conflicts that so many people in their early twenties face as they come of age. The persistent question of who you will become, the complications that come with navigating grief, the allure and anxiety of ambition and the joyful sometimes terrifying experience of falling in love.
Setting most of the novel within the walls of the Olympic Village came with its constraints, but there were even more opportunities. The Tokyo Olympics had around 12,000 athletes which was less than the number of undergraduate students at my university. So the tight(ish) knit community of the Village meant that my characters could bump into each other, meet each other’s friends and accelerate the pace of a normal relationship within two weeks in close proximity to each other. The setting of a Summer in Athens meant I could get swept up in long sunsets, and bright blue skyed al fresco meals while channelling the excitement that comes with life when the days get longer and the world feels more full of potential. It quickly went from being a book inspired by the lives of extraordinary people at the Olympics to a story about ordinary twenty-somethings experiencing what it’s like to have one extraordinary summer.
With a meet cute set you could liken to freshers’ week, a third-act conflict akin to exam season and an ending filled with the kind of emotion you reserve for graduation, Let the Games Begin felt like writing my own fictional university novel. Maybe a part of me wanted to compensate for the second half of my final year spent in lockdown, or maybe I just wanted to take the surreal world of the Olympics and imagine how ordinary people might experience it behind the scenes. Either way, I hope that when you read it, the story transports you into the magical world of the Olympic Games and that you get to spend the summer wrapped up in Zeke and Olivia’s love story as they find themselves, fall for each other and have one of those life-changing coming of age summers.
Let The Games Begin is published by Penguin on 18 July 2024
