Volunteering: Feb. 13 - The Silver Lining

Day 2 of the 2010 Vancouver Games

Ever since my second shift at Whistler Olympic Park (Feb. 11th) I've become a weather fanatic. Every day before I leave work, I check the following day's schedule. Every morning when I wake up at an ungodly hour on the Pacific coast, I check the weather again.

And every day since February 11th, the forecast has been miserable online and on paper. If it's not wet snow, then it's cold rain. I've been leaving WOP every day with my blue jacket hood pulled over my head to shield my head from the precipitation that is currently causing havoc at all the outdoor venues in Vancouver.

But these last two days during the ski jumping competition has been lucky. Though it would rain in Whistler Village, and heavy cloud coverage would menace us from the skies, the competitions themselves have miraculously stayed clear of precipitation. It was as if someone had foretold the most advantageous conditions in a sea of bad weather. Although I joked that someone must have sold their soul to the devil in order to keep the clouds from dumping more misery upon us all.

Such was the case today at the gold medal event in "normal hill" ski jumping. Even though the forecast had predicted wet snow in the morning, and then rain in the afternoon, there were actually clear blue skies above us at 8:30 AM, with the sun just behind the ski jumping peak. And the clouds held until just after the flower ceremony.

I was again working the venue for the first medal event of the Games with three other press assistants. My job was to sign off on forms from the print distribution office concerning official releases as well as working as a form of press security in the mix zone. Basically, all I did was make sure people got to where they wanted to, and stay in areas they are allowed to go to. For the most part, they behaved and things ran largely smoothly, although I did run into my fair share of rude Polish broadcasters who basically shoved me aside when I told them they cannot go where they wanted to go.

The standing rule was that no broadcasters were allowed to enter the press mixed zone. However, we did have one exception to that rule. We had an unexpected, or so it was to me, visitor that drew the Associated Press broadcasters and about a billion cameras into the zone to snap and record close to a thousand pictures, including the one I snuck on my camera.

Hello, US Vice President Joe Biden. I didn't expect you to be a ski jumping fan.

The thing that makes the Olympics such an interesting and dynamic entity in competitive sport is that it's often not the best that wins, but the one who for one day is able to provide the performance of his or her life. Not that the best didn't win in this event: number one ranked Swiss ski jumper Simon Ammann blew away the competition to win gold. But Polish ski jumper Adam Malysz's silver medal performance was certainly an unexpected development. That is not to say he came out of nowhere - he qualified as the 6th best ski jumper in the world and certainly was a medal hopeful - but given the depth of the Austrian jumpers ahead of him, he was not as highly favoured.

More shocking was how close Austria came to finishing the competition without a medal in the event, despite holding four of the top five rankings in World Cup standings. Austrian bronze medalist and second ranked jumper Gregor Schlierenzauer had to claw his way up from 6th place after first round qualifiers with a phenomenal 106.5 metre jump in order to secure the medal.

The Polish fans were estatic. As soon as Malysz secured the medal for their country, the fans were on their feet, chanting and singing their praises, as if they were at a soccer game.

They were a daring bunch to say the least. One gentleman in particular hopped four fences into the photographer's zone right next to the field of play before anyone realized that he wasn't supposed to be there, and then managed to sneak past me once into the press mix zone while Malysz was walking by, before I nearly grabbed him and physically threw him out. Another pair managed to sneak past the spectator's fence into a media corridor before I politely escorted them out. And then there was another who managed to draw himself into the broadcasting zone before special services realized it and asked him to leave.

Overall, the event took care of itself. And to be able to tell people that I witnessed the first gold medal event at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics is certainly special in of itself.