wow, thats nice. at what event did your father judged?
I'm not sure what they term the events at the Olympics, but he judges white water boating. Either kyacking or C1s.
At one point, my dad was judging a qualifying tournament I think for the world championships of white water (or maybe it was just the world championships, but there were basically no fans or media whatsoever, so I'm assuming it was a qualifying tournament), and my brother and I just had to hang out all day and watch white water boating which isn't really all that thrilling if you aren't into it.
So we got a couple of T-shirts and just hung out by the exit and got autographs on the shirt for every boater that came out. Probably 60% of the people didn't speak English, but you give them a shirt and a sharpie and they got the picture. Only one guy dissed us the whole day. Of course, we had no idea who the hell anyone was, but apparently basically everyone who was in the Olympics in Atlanta had signed both shirts (except 1 guy I suppose) which made for a pretty cool souvenir. Which, of course, I lost within 2 years and no longer have though it's possible it's still in a box somewhere in my house.
I'm 32 now, so I was probably ~16 or so when I was there and didn't really appreciate what a kind of cool thing that was. Not so great as if it was hanging out at the Olympic basketball trials and getting superstar autographs, but a neat thing to have. He sent me probably a dozen random autographed souvenirs from gold medalists and silver medalists from the Atlanta games all of which I also lost, but again they were all boaters and not major sports guys.
I hadn't really considered it until just now, but that's kind of scary that the judges can go and talk to the athletes to get autographs. I mean, I guess he knew most of the guys well enough anyway from being involved in the sport, but still kind of shows how open to bias different things are. Though his job was just to tell if a guy made it through a gate or didn't make it through a gate, so it didn't really have any subjective scores to it.