Free drinks 24/7 and endless goodies: US athlete Timothy Lam gives inside look at Olympic village What’s it like to be an Olympic athlete? NextShark spoke with Timothy Lam, who represented the U.S. in the men’s singles badminton in Tokyo to find out. Lam, 23, was born in Hong Kong and raised in Mountain View, California. His journey into badminton began at the early age of 6. While Lam always dreamed of joining the Olympics, he had no concrete plans to pursue it until he won the U19 singles at the 2014 Junior Pan American Games. He was a 17-year-old student at Los Altos High School.