Sara In Rio: Tuesday August 9, 2016. Unpredictable Nature of the Games

It was a busy day running around with a ton of things, helping people out. Basketball had another big practice and media day, so I helped out with getting all the media checked in and leading them into the workout stadium. The workout was scheduled for 2:30pm originally, and then late the night before, it was pushed up to 1:30pm. And then, that morning, it got pushed up even earlier to noon. Of course, this messed with a lot of people’s schedules but that’s the nature of the Games. You really can’t plan precisely for everything. Things come up last minute all the time, and you have to be flexible and you have to adjust. You wake up and think you have an idea of what the day will look like, and then it can completely flip-flop. For example, we have tried to schedule to get up the village a few other times. And, it’s not easy to get up to the village because you have to sign up early (at least 24 hours in advance) in order to get a guest pass, which is still subject to availability, and then figure out transport to actually get there, and plan for an entire day.

We invited one of the lawyers with work with from the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to come watch the basketball practice. We had cleared it with the Basketball High Performance Director at least a month before the Games, who was happy to accommodate the request, surprisingly. Apparently, Coach K has welcomed people to watch practice. However, with the change of practice time, our lawyer friend wasn’t sure if he could make it over earlier. It was his only ask of us (pretty much ever), but he was just too slammed with cases (two anti-doping cases had been filed that morning) and he couldn’t take off. He couldn’t anticipate those cases coming in that morning, as the unpredictability of the Games offers little advance notice. He ended up not being able to make it. I can’t tell you how excited he was to come to a practice, more than any other event, and he had to miss it. That's what it's like here.

I was helping getting all the media in when the busses of players started arriving. I was standing right there when they started getting off the bus, and so I pretended that I had a role to stay right in that spot for just a couple minutes to watch that, rather than immediately walk back to my role of checking off and leading more people in. When leading media was all done, we got to go in again and watch the practice ourselves. I watched them shooting around, and stretching, and working on various plays, and of course I took a million pictures. We were giggling a little because although I know the players, I truthfully couldn’t pick them all out (I know the Warriors guys, duh, but some of the other faces just aren’t as recognizable to me, which is hard for me to admit right here...). We were sitting next to the business manager of DeMarcus Cousins from the Kings, and he was helping identify everyone for us (along with looking up their faces online). He also gave us a signed picture of DeMarcus, which was pretyyyyyy cool I’d have to say, despite that he’s from the Kings.

The basketball practice was fun to watch, but honestly the real show from the basketball players came after their practice. They all came over to the Rugby practice field and started throwing a football around. This was right in front of our office, so we all stood out and watched them. In those moments, they transformed from their superstar status to just normal people, playing a game of catch on the field. I loved just hearing them call out each other’s names, and blocking each other from the catches, and running around laughing. The best was when one of them kept on calling out “Omaha” (the trademark call of QB Peyton Manning from the Broncos) when catching the snap. When one guy slipped, you realized it probably wasn’t the best idea for them to be playing around in case there was some injury, but everything was fine. After watching them, I’d have to say that I don’t think any of them will be drafted to the NFL any time soon… Haha.

Whenever any athlete walks by around here, I always say hi, no matter who it is. So, when Carmelo Anthony walked by, it was the same. I just said hi. And he replied by asking Rachel and I how we were doing. He was just walking by so it wasn’t really like he was looking for an answer, but basically we were like deers in headlights. Outside of that stadium, outside of their tight tight security, outside of the media, outside of their role as basketball players, they are just people. People having fun and saying hi.

After that, it was already too late for our lunch at Flamengo, so we decided to walk to the nearby mall to grab something. The mall is only two blocks away! Danger if I had known this before… And the mall was beautiful, like any American mall with any store you could be looking for. 4 stories actually. We went to the top with the food court, but that is one part that is not like American mall food courts. Pretty much every restaurant was a sit-down restaurant, not fast food. We had delicious salads and what a treat that was! There are some advisory warning about not eating salads because they wash the greens in the dirty water, but I just can’t go without that for the entire time. And, it was a nice place, so I trusted it. I am not that cautious with all of those warnings, and I guess we’ll just see how my stomach handles. I say that the salad was a treat also because a lot of the food here is just quick things: sandwiches, people go out for a quick pizza, etc. I know I’ll be going back there. And yes, there was a Starbucks in the mall as well. So, of course, we had to carry several drinks back to everyone working at Flamengo. A small reminder of the world back at home.

My boss and I had a late conference call that night (well, not that late for Colorado, but late for us) regarding the International Paralympic Committee ban on Russian athletes at the Rio Paralympic Games. A very big deal. And, almost a slap in the face to the IOC which did not do that to all the Russian athletes at the Olympics. But, it raises a lot of questions, in particular, will there be a re-allocation of those slots to US athletes? We don’t know the answer to that right now, but we discussed that situation. There’s a lot more that goes into it, but basically we had a lot of work to do on it, and work on a memo to send out to our sports. I didn’t get done until about 10:30pm. As I said before, work at home doesn’t just cease. And, there are the Paralympics coming up, so an influx of issues there. However, watching the basketball players play (basketball and football) during the day was worth the extra work at night. You never know what will happen day-to-day here and you have to experience what is in front of you, when it happens. You can always catch up on work at night, but you don’t always get to watch superstar athletes goof around throwing ball during any normal day. Ever.