Day1 –4th of August ,Fly Continental Airlines , CO 89 direct to Beijing from Newark (13hrs 25min) Touchdown on the 5th then basically doing all the technical stuff with regards to rooms, clothing packs and reading manuals
Day 2 – Training on the triathlon bike course for 3hours
Day3 – Training on the Road Race Course for 4 hours
Day4 – Opening Ceremony (won’t be going as racing next day)
Day5 – 245km Road Race
Day6 – Taking the Olympic experience all in and maybe shopping
Day7 – Leave China on bound for Salt Lake City Utah….

I’m finally on way to the games and so far so good, thought I was gonna get stung into paying for my bike checking in as usual? But Once in a blue moon rarities do occur! But all the same off to a good start! So 13+ hrs around to the other side of the world, a couple of movies, a couple of episodes of the Facts of Life (remember that one?), a few hours of sleep, some good old airplane food and we had made it to Beijing. Immigration was pretty straight forward for a change here and I just breezed through that one. I was met by Dallas Seymour (Former Rugby Sevens Great and All Black) He’s one of the athlete support crew that is working for the NZOC. He led me out of the craziness onto a bus and then onto the Olympic village.

We cruised for about 30min and finally arrived at the Olympic village, there are so many locals working here at the games its amazing! We got through the security check points with no problems except for a spare bike chain I had in my luggage but once they found that and saw what it was we had no problems. We walked over to where the NZ building was and there was a good little crowd waiting out front to greet me, as I got closer they broke out into the HAKA! It was awesome and loud…. I bet no other countries greet their athletes like that? The staff here are awesome and make you feel really welcomed! We even have a little brew (coffee) room downstairs and I managed to get one in this morning as Dallas was behind the machine and it was not bad for a Rugby player!

Once that was over it was into my room and sort all my stuff out! As you can imagine it was a bit like Xmas… First you have all your casual team clothing, team bags and info. Then you’ve got your racing clothes and then there were a few gifts bags from China with souvenirs, bits n pieces. Oh and a little bag of goodies from home, Pineapple Lumps, Jaffas, Chocolate Fish, Minties etc.. Very welcomed of course! It’s really great to see how well organised the team is! Its quite cool to see how the team has pimped out the building also with a ‘slice of heaven’ Our Building is actually labelled “Bro Town” (Kiwi Cartoon which I guess can be compared with Family Guy/South Park/Simpsons)
I managed to get an hour in on the bike just before dinner; of course there were people everywhere! But with over 1.3Billion people and about 1/5th of the world’s population I was bound to run into a bit of congestion!! The weird thing is though no-one seems to be doing anything or going anywhere? They are all just standing around… Dinner in the main dinning hall was the next step. Man that was an experience to say the least. It’s a massive place and if you can think of it you’ll probably find it there. There was even a McDonalds hiding down in the corner which I’m sure everyone wanted to go visit. It will be pretty busy once the events start to draw to a close I’d say?

So that’s about it for Day 1. Its only 9:15pm but I’m smashed and ready to sleep.

Catch ya later for Day 2…..

Wanshang Hao (Good Evening)

Chady

Photo’s by: Glen Chadwick