Cheering Section Salt Lake City Man Is Attending His 10th Olympics NYTimes.com

Everen T. Brown is trying to break his Olympic record.

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“My goal is to see 100 events,” said Brown, a 48-year-old photographer from Salt Lake City who is attending his 10th Olympics.

“Any fan who can pull that off deserves a gold medal.”

Brown and his 23-year-old nephew, Matthew Kallio, are in Beijing for what Brown calls “the ultimate five-ring circus.” Brown, who has taken Kallio to six Olympics, secured tickets to 85 events before heading to China last month.

“As a child who grew up watching ABC’s ‘Wide World of Sports,’ I just knew someday that I would have to attend some of the greatest sports events in the world personally,” Brown said. “My first Olympiad was in Los Angeles in 1984. The opening ceremonies were incredible, and I was hooked.”

Brown has also attended the Games in Calgary (1988), Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996), Nagano (1998), Sydney (2000), Salt Lake City (2002) Athens (2004) and Turin (2006).

“Each set of Olympics holds a different level of excitement,” he said. “The best part of every one of them is starting up conversations with fans from all over the world and sharing stories about our favorite athletes and our favorite Olympic moments.”

Brown was a torch-bearer for the Sydney and Salt Lake Games, and his Olympic journeys will have covered more than 100,000 miles by the time he returns from Beijing. Brown’s favorite sports are beach volleyball and ice hockey.

“My uncle has an incredible passion for the Olympics, and a lot of that passion has rubbed off on me throughout the years,” said Kallio, a student at Salt Lake Community College. “You have to live it to understand the rush of adrenaline that comes from going to these events.”

Brown said he bought tickets from agents in the United States.

“The tickets in Beijing are pegged to the local economy,” averaging to each, he said. “They are the cheapest I’ve seen since Los Angeles.”

As a photographer, Brown said he was inspired by his first Olympics.

“At the opening ceremonies in Los Angeles, the card stunt, with spectators holding cards that formed the flags of the Olympic countries, motivated me to get my 360-degree panoramic camera,” he said. “No other camera could capture such an event.”

In Calgary, that camera caught spectators in T-shirts and shorts.

“This was the Winter Olympics that was in need of winter weather,” Brown said. “Everything was melting due to the Chinook winds, and events were postponed.”

In Barcelona, Brown photographed Kallio, then 7, trading pins at his first Olympics. In Atlanta, he captured images of the debut of beach volleyball as an Olympic sport.

“In Atlanta, we discovered tickets being sold on the street at less than face value,” Brown said. “So we decided to extend our stay and attend one of every summer Olympic sport.”

As a result, they watched 65 events, including six in one day, their personal records.

“It was an exhausting schedule,” Brown said.

Nagano, he added, was equally exhausting.

“No rooms were available, as it is a very small town,” Brown said. “So we bought a bullet train pass and traveled each day from Tokyo,” about an hour and a half from Nagano.

On the last night, they stayed in Nagano for the closing ceremony, which Brown recalled as “the coldest weather I have ever been in.”

Brown did not need accommodations for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, but he got them anyway.

“I have friends who were coming for the Games but could not make the first six days, so they give me their hotel rooms,” he said. “I was in a first-class hotel for the first five nights in my own hometown. It was nice being pampered for those days.”

The best part of Athens, Brown said, was Michael Phelps, who won eight swimming medals. In Turin, the snowboarding was enjoyable and the crowds were fun, Brown said. But “this was a city that was not happy to see the Games invade,” he added. “The locals just did not get it.”

Throughout the years, Brown has collected Olympic memorabilia, including the two torches he carried and a 150-foot banner from the Atlanta swimming events.

“I’m still single,” he said, “so I can still get away with doing all of this crazy stuff.”

E-mail: cheers@nytimes.com

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