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Christina Harp’s stay in China wasn’t all work. The communications volunteer managed to take in an evening of track and field and show her red, white and blue colors inside Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium.

It’s been a while since the 2008 Beijing Olympics concluded on Aug. 24. Christina Harp, BS ’08, has settled in to her first post-college job as an account coordinator at Rhea + Kaiser Marketing Communications in Naperville, Ill.

But a day doesn’t go by that Harp isn’t flooded with memories of her seven-week, once-in-a-lifetime summer experience in China as a volunteer for the Olympic News Service.

Harp was dispatched to the Olympic cycling venues, where she got to rub shoulders with the spandex-clad bicycling superstars of the velodrome and the motocross tracks.

“I fell in love with international track cycling in a serious way,” Harp says.

Other memorable moments were seeing the Great Wall of China and watching Usain Bolt electrify 90,000 fans and the world with his record 100-meter dash.

Even the flight back to the states gave Harp a thrill when she realized that Olympic basketball star Jason Kidd was on the same plane. So what if he was in first class and she was in coach?

But the memory that keeps playing in heavy rotation in her mind occurred during the medal ceremony for the women’s mountain bike race, viewed mostly by family and friends.

“I was working as a photographer’s assistant,” says Harp, who studied ag communication at Purdue. “I was only 20 feet away from the winners during the medal ceremony, and I could just see how much the Olympics meant to them when they got their medals. I could see their emotions. And I cried. It was humbling to see people who had achieved their dreams by working so hard. I still get goosebumps thinking about it.”