Day Numero Nine

Links!

Beach Volleyball – Story by Elliott Almond – pix by me

USA Fencing – wire story pix by me

Women’s boxing – wire story – pix by me

Panoramas:

Beach Volleyball Venue (this has to be the venue with the nicest views)

Beach Volleyball Venue – outside

I got to feel like a real human tonight – went and had a sit down meal (Chinese food) with Elliott after beach volleyball in “Chinatown,” right next to Leicester Square.  Pretty darn good – after that we went to Haagen Dazs for ice cream!  Chocolate Chocolate Chip!:

Dragged a little this morning – yesterday was a long day – figured I spent at least five hours of the day either on the bus, the tube, the train or walking!

John let me know about some US fencing team in the semifinal – with one fencer from San Francisco (ended up two of them were from SF) – so headed over there – it was at ExCel – it’ll be nice to finally be going cause it’s only about four train stops from where I am staying.

Found the media entrance – took me a while to figure out where things were cause the signage wasn’t so great… But found the “field of play” waited until the round before the US was over and found a very helpful photo person.  He explained to me most of the rules and what was going to happen.  I photographed fencing before – but didn’t have anyone tell me how the scoring and stuff worked.

Afterwards shot four rounds of Women’s boxing – USA vs Great Britain – first time for Women’s boxing… I have a female friend that boxes – so that was neat.  Was very quick – and the USA boxer didn’t do so great.  John and I grabbed lunch at ExCel – a roast chicken place… it was okay.  Bye John:

Then headed straight from ExCel to Russell Square – John and I were joking that since it would make sense then the bus probably wouldn’t go from ExCel to Russell Square (downtown) – but they actually did have a bus that did that.  So he headed off to the Olympic Stadium and I headed off to beach volleyball.  We took a little tour of London because I guess a bunch of roads were closed:

Ran into Robert Gauthier (LA Times) at beach volleyball – he had just gotten back from Wimbledon – he covered the Men’s gold medal singles final – it became a ticketed event and apparently only six US media were admitted (even if we had wanted to cover it we probably couldn’t have gotten in) – it was Great Britain vs. Sweden.

Tonight is what pretty much everyone would consider to be the biggest event in the Olympics.  It’s also the scariest to cover.  The Men’s 100m.  I had planned to cover the 100m, brought my remotes over the pond mostly just for that event… but our local beach volleyball players are in the quarterfinals and if they lost then it would have been a really big deal.  If Kerri Walsh Jennings (as she prefers to be known according to Purdy) wins then it’s not a big deal at all – as our Olympics sports editor, Mark Conley, said – we (Elliott and I) are babysitting beach volleyball.  They are playing against the Italians who apparently beat them in the last year… so it was possible for them to lose.  But they didn’t, not even close – it was a nice quick match.  So we got to watch the 100m on tv… that’s Elliott on the far left, and Robert – second from right (blurry):

Kyle Terada was here and he was nice enough to loan me his 16mm so that I could do a couple more panoramas – one that I really wanted to do from the top of the beach volleyball venue cause it has a super cool background – and then one outside so that you could see that it’s a completely temporary structure.  Was hoping to go to dinner with Robert but he kinda crashed so Elliott and I walked around near the venue – it was late – like 10:30 but found the Chinese place – Super Star Chinese Restaurant.

On the way we ran into Dana Vollmer on the street with her family – she’s won like four gold medals or something like that – she went to Stanford.  They were there watching beach volleyball.  Elliott recognized her and her family, they recognized Elliott, since he has interviewed them a bunch of times – he was nice enough to introduce me – but they didn’t know me from Adam.  They were super nice.  They had just finished eating at a Thai restaurant that Elliott wanted to go to a half block away (it was closed by the time got there though).  “That’s the Olympics” Elliott said.  It was really neat – normal people doing extraordinary things (at least that’s my interpretation of his statement).

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