An explanation on the pictures, I'm pretty sure I haven't put up a picture of the Laoshan Velodrome yet, so there is a look at the outside of the velodrome. The mural of past biking champions is on the side of the hill that leads to the BMX course at the top, while the mountain bike course is behind the velodrome from the angle that the picture is taken. A funny story about the mural, the first day that we showed up for work, we noticed that the country names attached the cyclists on the mural were spelled wrong. Ireland was Lreland and England was Englang for instance. It was such a major gaff that we all had to sit there for a second to make sure we were really seeing the mistakes. I mean, I understand that there is a language barrier, but misspelling a country's name? That's a little hard to do. Anyway, the guy in the pic is fixing the names, although you can tell where they had to alter the metal to make different letters. Oh well, they got it right.
The past two days at work have been dedicated to mock press conferences as we have dry runs of the entire facility acting as if there was a real race occurring. Mostly we've just been doing the same thing that we do during training, with other volunteers acting as athletes for us to interview. We ask them questions, this time using the language services volunteers to translate for us so that we get experience with them and they with us, and then type up our flash quotes just like we would in a real race. It's getting to be a lot of fun, because more and more we're seeing cyclists on the track as they practice, and the view from inside the track is really incredible. Athletes get here on Tuesday en masse, so this should be a fun week.
We got to see the mixed zone for the mountain biking course today, and on a day that it had to hit at least 98 degrees, the mixed zone outside was murderously hot. The BMX mixed zone, which we'll get to see tomorrow, should be just as bad, with no shade in sight, so we have that to look forward to. The press conferences have been the most interesting part of these exercises. Normally, we will be taking notes for an extensive press conference highlight during the games, but in this dry run we are instead acting as journalists might and asking sensitive or difficult questions. The goal is to give the moderator, interpreters and other press conference workers a chance to see what they can do better, so we get to have some fun.
We get introduce ourselves as journalists from anything from the Associated Press to the New York Times, so that's always fun. Also, we get to pick any kind of sensitive question that we want, which for us usually involves pollution. Also, the part that was new for me was working with interpreters. You quickly understand that since your question has to be translated from English into another language and the response must be similarly translated through a middle man, the athlete does not get your exact question and you do not get the exact quote. I'm curious as to how this will affect the actual quotes during the Games, but hopefully the translators will be good enough to get everything across to both the athletes and the journalists.
One of the cooler things to happen to our group lately has been Leroy's chance to go to a practice of the opening ceremonies at the Bird's Nest. The practices are not open to the public, but our group of 100 or so volunteers got eight tickets, and in a random drawing Leroy got a coveted ticket to the session. He came back with a ridiculous number of details, so I can't get into everything he saw, but these opening ceremonies might eclipse any we've seen in the recent past in pure manpower and creativity. From Leroy's estimate, there could be over 10,000 different people in the show, so this should be something to look forward to.
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