Long Lagoa days

I've now been working from the Lagoa stadium most days for just over a week. It really is a stunning venue, with the statue of Christ the Redeemer looking down over the lake and hills all around.

For the most part, the water has been pretty good. On several days including today it's like a mirror in the mornings with the wind picking up slightly in the afternoons. Yesterday it was much worse with white caps in parts of the lake, and they postponed the start of training, before opening the course only from the 1000m mark.

View across to the stands

Of course the mainstream media have been mostly focusing not on how flat the water is but on how clean it is. There was a bit of a fuss last year when a number of the US junior team got sick at the Junior World Championships, although given that very few other athletes got ill it does seem as likely that the Americans picked something up on their flight to Brazil or through eating something dodgy as through the water. US rower Megan Kalmoe wrote an excellent, passionate response to the negative press last week (which, reproduced on The Guardian, picked up a whole bunch of people saying she was over-privileged and moany and missing the point that she thought the press should focus on some of the more serious problems in Brazil).

A friend introduced me to Manoela, a Brazilian journalist and rower who trains out of Botafogo rowing club, and she kindly took me out in a double last week before the lake was closed to non-Olympic rowers. Manoela says she's been rowing on the Lagoa for 20 years and has never got sick. You wouldn't drink the water (it's partially salty anyway), but equally a few splashes are unlikely to be harmful. They're monitoring quality every day and the word is that at the moment, the water in the Lagoa is the best quality it's been for years.

Botafogo is one of several clubs around the lake. Flamengo is the one most-affected by the Games as they row basically from the finish line and their whole area is taken up with Games stuff. There's a permanent rowing stadium on site and a cinema and restaurant complex - we're in there, along with the workforce and athlete dining areas, and they're using a cinema as the press conference room! Then they've added an extra grandstand and all sorts of tents for everything needed to run an Olympic regatta - it's quite an operation.

I'm working from the venue media centre alongside a great group of mostly Brazilians in the press operations team, led by our venue media manager Cora who I worked with in London. Although my job is less operational than theirs I'm trying to help a bit as they prepare the media centre for journalists, who arrive next week when we open for business properly.

At the moment we're arriving fairly early (although it'll be earlier during competition). There's a quick team meeting and then everyone gets on with what they need to do. I check social media and news websites for any updates about rowers or canoeists I ought to be aware of, and then about 9.30am I've taken to heading over to the boat park to see who's around. ONS writers get privileged access which we have to be careful not to abuse, so I'm mostly looking for coaches who are hanging around waiting for their rowers to get off the water to ask if I can speak to the athletes.

Ergos. Ugh.

So far I've been aiming for some of the less well-represented nations. Obviously I want to speak to the handful of defending Olympic champions who are back for another shot at gold, but chances are we'll interview them several times during the competition. My challenge is to hunt out the stories behind some of the other rowers - the Angolan lightweight men's double scull, the first Angolans to row at an Olympic Games; the very sweet and slightly shy scullers from India and Vanuatu, absorbing everything with hopes of achieving their best possible results; the incredibly young Chilean lightweight women's double, who are both just 19; the lovely Polish Wierzbowska sisters who despite being complete opposites are having in a ball in their pair; and former Oxford Blue Michelle Pearson who's made it to the Olympics to row for her native Bermuda and had brilliant things to say about Title IX.

It's great fun, although there's been a fair bit of hanging around, but I've finally got the technology working to take my laptop to the boat park and get online while I wait.

OBS interviewing Phil Rowley, coach of the Angolan LM2x

Once I've got enough quotes, whether through an interview I've done or through listening to an interview done by the Olympic Broadcast Service (who do basically what we do, except for television), I head back to the media centre and file the quotes and maybe a story from them. There's usually some research or admin to do too. Lunch is much like the food we had at the MPC - salad, rice and beans or pasta, a cooked veg, and a choice of a veggie option, chicken/fish, or beef, then something like a chocolate mousse or a bit of fruit.

Later on I tend to head back to the boat park to catch the afternoon training rush, although it's a little quieter then. Currently we have perhaps a third of the nations present and New Zealand is the only big team - they had a few boats training from Sunday and everyone else arrived today (cue a few starstruck people eyeing the nailed-on-for-gold Kiwi pair). France arrived today too and Australia started getting their boats on to racks; we're expecting the USA and GB in the next couple of days and then it'll be really busy.

Next week our press ops volunteers arrive, in time for the media rush, and also my two American 'flash quote reporters' who'll be helping collect reactions from the rowers after they race. It'll be good to be a bigger team ahead of the Games beginning on 6 August - only eight days to go!