SamWeale

My Olympic Experience

From day one you sensed this was going to be a something quite special, not only because it was the Olympics games, but because it was in China as well. Being sat at home for the first week watching everything on television, I was itching to get out there. We didn’t arrive into the village until the Sunday morning of the second week. On arrival a swarm of volunteers was on hand to collect our bags and take them to our accommodation. The first two athletes I saw were two Russian wrestlers, from that point on we were playing guess the sport of the vast array of different sized athletes walking about the village. At 6”2, I no longer consider myself tall, being dwarfed by so many athletes including a large number of girls. The Russian female volleyball team were huge, no exaggerating, some must have been easily over 6’5”.

Photos courtesy of Julian Finney of Getty Images

It took a couple days to feel at home and get used to the sheer size of the whole village. It shouldn’t really be called a village, more like a small town, complete with supermarket and shops and even a hairdresser, which I have to admit I took advantage of, it was free and the curls had to be tamed a little! I was a little nervous but the sweet Chinese girl who didn’t speak a word of English did well. Our apartments were really quite nice and were made more comfortable with the help of B&Q, who provided us with sofas and a TV, something which other countries didn’t have.

Going back to the free thing, pretty much everything in the village is free, all the food you can eat and all the drink, as long as it is Coke Cola! Well that’s not strictly true they did have water and orange juice, good job or my teeth may have rotted away by the end of the week!

The dining room was enormous, the size of about three football pitches. It was split into Asian, European, and international sections, which repeated themselves across the hall, with a McDonalds at the end of the hall. Yes, there was a McDonalds in the village, and yes, it was free, and believe it or not the queue was always huge. As we had arrived in the second week I thought it was all the athletes who had finished there competition eating McDonalds, but in actual fact it was apparently packed straight away after the opening ceremony!

The dining room was perfect people spotting territory, I think you know when you’re really famous when you get mobbed by fellow athletes in the Olympic village! The one person I wanted to see was Michael Phelps but failed to spot him, I did bump into Ronaldinho, quite literally! He was coming towards myself and Sam Sacksen, surrounded by about 30 people, and in an attempt to get away he headed towards us. Not knowing whether to join in the mayhem and try and get a photo with him, I froze, fumbling with my camera trying to capture the moment, which I failed to do, so no proof, just my word!

Back to the food, I have to mention the Peking Duck Pancakes which were something else! I managed to hold myself back from having any of them before the competition, but after the competition I most have hit the 50 mark, which over 4 days equates to about 2 whole ducks! I think I better get back to training pretty soon!

The Competition...

So to the competition itself, I got to sleep fine the night before, which I was surprised about. The alarm went off at 5.32 and the day of the competition had finally arrived, all those years of training for this day, a day which on paper was probably the longest pentathlon I had done, in terms of the timings of the events, but one which flashed by me in no time at all.

There were a quite a few great moments during the competition day which will stick with me for the rest of my life. It’s before each discipline you really take the experience in. Once the competition begins you are in the moment, and everything is a blur really. For the shooting and fencing the warm up area was two floors below the field of play, so climbing two flights of stairs with wobbly legs before the shoot took a while. Two hours later it was completely different feeling going up the same flight of stairs for the fence. It felt like you were gladiators back in the Roman times, waiting to enter the mighty Coliseum. The fencing hall was a slightly square coliseum and there were a few less people. However, the atmosphere was still amazing, helped by my sister, Becky, her partner, David, and fellow Pentathlete and chief cheerleader Mhairi Spence.

After a disappointing 177 in the shooting, and a determined 18 victories and 17 defeats in the fencing, I was back in 26th position, with swimming to come. It was during the swimming warm up, looking up at the big screen and seeing the Olympic rings, it finally sunk in that I was at the Olympic Games. I didn’t want to get out the pool and probably did a bit of a longer warm up than normal as a result of this. After toweling down, the Speedo LZR suit and Great Britain tracksuit were on, the Ipod was in, and I was ready to swim like Michael Phelps. Well a little slower perhaps, but after a personal best swim of 2 minutes and 2 seconds, I had moved up to 11th place going into the riding.

The warm up area for the riding was outside the stadium, but you could hear the slightly over excited Chinese crowds oohs and aahs, so I was half aware that some athletes were finding things tough. Your job is to be aware how your horse is feeling, and trying to keep it calm, which in turn relaxes you. However, maybe I kept him a little too calm; especially into jump four on the course, which he was a little reluctant to jump! Two refusals later and one knock down I missed out on an opportunity to take advantage of others people’s downfall and dropped one place back to 12th position. You could sit here all day analysing your performance, so we won’t, and we will move swiftly onto the run!

Again it was the warm up I remember most; jogging round the course in front of 30,000 people all cheering and waving was pretty special, looking up high into the stands trying to spot the union jacks and giving them a wave. Starting 12th I quickly passed a couple of athletes and held my position most of the race, missing out on a couple more positions in the final dash for the line, but holding onto the 10th place.

A day later it was me in the stands cheering the girls on, with the help of Mhairi and Jamie we started a Mexican wave in the stadium, it was quite hard to get going at first but the Chinese soon cottoned onto the idea! One thing London needs to sort out is the food for spectators, it was terrible, popcorn and hot dogs were about the extent of it.

The next couple of days were spent watching more sport and enjoying the whole Olympic experience. We managed to get tickets for athletics, diving and beach volley and of course went to a few parties. As we didn’t go to the opening ceremony it was great to get to go to the closing ceremony, it was pretty amazing walking into the middle of the Birds Nest stadium, which felt smaller when you were in the middle of it than when watching from the sides.

The whole experience was something so special and one which will stay for me for the rest of my life and will definitely keep me inspired for the next four years leading up to the London Olympics. Overall I was slightly disappointed with a couple of events notably the shoot and ride, where in the ride I made the fatal mistake of trusting the horse a little too much going into jump four, but hey you learn from your mistakes - that's pentathlon for you! I have to be happy really with a top ten finish. Hopefully next time I can bring back a medal!

Thanks for taking time to read my report, hope you enjoyed it! Please have a look at my gallery for photos from the games.