Tuesday 7 February 2006

She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain -- If Only the Olympic Bus System Would Work

The wifi connection is down, it takes four hours to get from the mountains (where I am based) to Turin itself (where the press conferences are), and my flat looks like the unloveliest cross between summer camp, a hostel, and a juvenile detention center. Oh, yeah – and there’s not even a phone line, so I can’t imagine why the press office allocated the place to me. How are they expecting me to file stories about the fabulousness I’m seeing? (Or maybe that’s why…)

I’m trying to laugh. I just took a picture of my jetlagged colleague asleep at his desk in the media center (hello, bribery material!), and I just bumped into a sportswriter I met when I was an intern at her newspaper more than 10 years ago. (She and her boss, the paper’s sports editor, said my publication is “a step up.” Ha.) And I was standing behind Scott Hamilton in the security check line for the main press center, dying to ask him how much worse he’s treated as a member of the press as opposed to an athlete.

And I must comment on the total geekdom of some of the reporters, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. They remind me of people from opposing debate teams in high school, who tried to intimidate you with their wardrobes -- basically, displaying how much experience they have by wearing clothing from all the various sporting events they've covered. Yesterday I was seated across from a guy wearing: 1. a Sydney 2000 Olympics jacket. 2. A Super Bowl polo shirt (couldn't have been the most recent one as he wouldn't have physically been able to get from the game to where we were in that time). 3. A fanny pack from another Australian sporting event. 4. a backpack from another Olympic games (couldn't tell which one).

More when I get it – or can get online (I’ve just smiled sweetly at the keeper of the DSL line at one of our corporate siblings’s rather plush office…)

1 comment:

  1. Oh, sounds like so much fun compared to where I am. ;)

    ReplyDelete