Notes From The Olympics

[Kevin Arnold]

I thought yo'all might enjoy this email from a neighbor's son in law who works for NBC production at the Olympics. It speaks for itself:

Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 02:28:23 +1000 (EST)

Hello,

      The beach volleyball quarterfinals are underway.
Of the 8 matches today we cover 5.  The temperatures
are still rising, on the sand we got a reading of 119
degrees.  Our cameramen are rotating around so that no
one gets burned up or burned out.  Up to now there had
been 5 cameramen for 4 cameras ensuring a relief guy
for the handhelds who spend all their time on the
sand.  One of our guys who normally runs a camera in
the shade, had not yet been to the sand but because
there is no relief guy he had to help out.  When he
got in position on the hot sand our director said
welcome to hell.  He replied "I thought hell would be
colder than this."  Perhaps it loses something on the
translation but we all thought it was the line of the
week and under scored the amazing conditions that
these players are competing in.
      I've included a picture of our compound, my home
away from home these last 2 weeks.  I spend each match
in the TV truck but during our breaks I eat in the
food tent and prepare labels in the office cabin.
There are restrooms available in the compound that we
share with the TV crew from the AOB (the host feed).
The office cabin (as are all cabins) is air
conditioned so people tend to congregate there rather
than sit out in the hot humid weather.  I spent a bit
of time there modifying the label template I had into
one that fits on labels obtainable here.  By the time
I was done programming all I had to do was type the
winning teams into a bracket and all the data
transferred to the proper label.  Labeling might not
seem like a big deal to you but for each match we
cover, there are 6 tapes that require 2 labels each.
For the matches we don't cover one tape records
requiring 2 labels.  However, remember early on we
were on stand by so I had to have 12 labels with 6
different bits of info ready to go incase we needed
them.  That's a lot of labels each day so I made sure
the computer printer did the heavy lifting.
     It's all going smooth here we're looking forward
to shorter days ahead but for now we're just plugging
along.  I hope you've had a chance to catch some of
our coverage, the games are usually pretty exciting
and the athletes are pretty entertaining.

Allen