Australian K4 paddler Lisa Oldenhof brings us an update on life in the Olympic Village.
The Aussie paddling team has been in the village for well over 2 weeks now, and are itching to get out and have a hit out, which we will do on Monday in our K4 500m race. Olympic fever is well and truly on, with most sports either well underway or finished, and then the odd sport like ours that hasn't even started yet.
I've managed to witness some great results live – Steph Rice win her 400IM in a world record, WA's Robin Bell win bronze in the C1 slalom canoeing, and our room mate, Jacqui Lawrence for a silver medal yesterday in the women's K1 slalom event. That has certainly been the highlight so far. My journey to the swimming this morning wasn't so eventful, with Eamon Sullivan unfortunately missing out on the medals in the 50m free.
Training has been going quite well – it's not easy to find good water when there are rowers, kayakers and canoe paddlers all trying to train and warm up/cool down, and there is a lot of weed on the warm up lake, but all in all its pretty smooth running. We are well and truly in taper now, with two days til racing as I write this, so a maximum of one session per day.
Life in the village is pretty cool – it's getting more active and less serious as more and more athletes finish, so we just spend time in our air conditioned rooms, watching 14 channels of live Olympic footage. The number of folding miniature pushbikes in the village is now into the thousands I reckon, with four more to be added tonight when our K4 girls pick ours up for a mere 60 dollars.
The food hall is getting a smashing now – with snickers bars probably the most popular. Its really quite amusing to watch all the (diplomatically spoken) "larger" athletes taking 15 snickers at once, and then the fit looking athletes taking 30 in an attempt to perhaps make up for the past 6 months. The peking duck is to die for, and the only decent coffee available in all of China being at McCafe, means there is at least a 10-15 minute wait for your coffee (or double chocolate frappe, skim milk, no cream thanks I'm still racing). It really is pretty cool to be able to eat a meal and look over your left shoulder to see Andrew Bogut, and right shoulder Michael Phelps (well actually I haven't sat next to him but I'm sure thats just coz he was busy at the time).
We've already experienced already make a couple of little boo boos along the way – like me asking a group of guys including Cadel Evans what sport they did, my team mate Chantal asking Princess Mary to sign a birthday card for our team mate and being rejected, and perhaps singing on stage with Shannon Noll in front of a lot of media cameras without knowing the words could count.
At the end of the day here everyone is here for the same reason (except the tennis pros, they’ve left for the US Open already to win some dollars), so even though there are pretty awesome athletes around, you quickly realize that they are normal people.
When I write again next week it will hopefully be with some good reports on racing. We are on at 4.40 Monday (heat), Wed afternoon if we have to do a semi-final, and 4.20 Friday (final). I'm sure Robbie will open the bar to watch it on the big screen!
Beijing
