I slept badly (I blame the combination of opening ceremony excitement and mixing beer and a capirinha) and woke early, so decided to just get up and go. I arrived at the lake as the sun was rising over the most incredible flat water. It couldn't have been more perfect.
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| Yes, this was the morning before the storm |
Even before 8am it was hot, and when me and my two American student flash quote reporters (Olivia and Shauna) went to the mixed zone it was starting to get very hot.
The mixed zone, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the area in a sporting event where the athletes mix with the media. They do broadcast first - NBC is the first pen, followed by our colleagues on the Olympic Broadcasting Service/Olympic News Channel, and then BBC. Then it's radio, and finally print and digital press. In ONS we have a privileged position to stand in the OBS pen and listen to their interviews, which is extraordinarily useful as they're often the only people to get a decent interview and always one of the first.
In the mixed zone our job is to produce flash quotes - quick, pithy quotes which journalists can use if they want to create their stories. Ours are also used by World Rowing so if you want to see the sort of stuff we produce check out their Olympic live blog.
Shauna, Olivia and I developed a pretty good method today. We had two computers and I needed to check over their quotes before sending them to be subbed and published, so they alternated between standing in the OBS pen and taking quotes and writing them up. I hovered to pounce on athletes to get extra quotes or quotes from people who'd bypassed OBS. After a slow start when I thought that nobody was going to stop, it all kicked off and in total we managed to get quotes from almost 30 athletes or crews over the course of the five hours we were there.
The topic was almost entirely about the weather. Although the first couple of races were pretty good the wind then kicked up with a vengeance and it became a survival game. Although the men's races went pretty much as I expected there were some surprises in the women's singles - especially in heat one, where a 22-year-old Mexican lightweight took on the race with utterly no fear, posted the fastest time of the day and beat favourite and London 2012 bronze medallist Kim Brennan. Nigeria's first-ever rower Chierika Ukogu, who I interviewed last week - a very impressive woman - also had a good race, leading Olympic champion Mirka Knapkova to the 1500m mark.
Then in the men's pairs Serbia caught a crab and capsized, which I totally missed because I was busy interviewing someone else. In the women's doubles Australia caught a little crab and then Greece, chasing hard, caught a proper boat-stopper. It was all quite dramatic and every single person who came off the water said that it was the worst conditions they'd ever rowed in. We had to stop putting in quotes about how atrocious the conditions were because there were simply too many!
I had a comedy few minutes when the British doubles came through. There was a bit of a scrum to interview the women, and they were playing drums nearby and Katherine Grainger's got quite a quiet voice, so I couldn't hear a thing. I gave up and went to interview the men's double, who were disappointed with missing the semis but pragmatic about it. The women were still hanging around talking to the fans watching on from the spectator pathway next to the mixed zone, so I checked with the press officer Caroline that I could grab them for a couple more quotes. But all the fans wanted selfies with Katherine and Vicky Thornley and I ended up taking a bunch of them before I could get to speak to them. I apologise to anyone whose picture I messed up ...
By the time I left the lake at about 5.30pm it was glassy calm again. I suspect the schedules may move around in the next few days. Please pray to the weather gods for everyone racing, and those of us covering the event. I'm not sure I can do seven more days of quotes about waves.
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