Olympic Memories

Watching the Movies has brought back a few memories for me…

One was that an event started perfectly on an hour – I think it was the race walking. Something like exactly 5:00 or so our time. And I remember that the Sydney Olympics worked in a similar way too. I think that is quite impressive as I cannot tell you how many events Live and on TV run late. But the events on the Olympics are commonly running EXACTLY on time to the fraction of the second.

I have been amazed looking at the quality of the pictures for events such as the road racing. The quality was so good. There was pixelation in many places unfortunately, but without going digital this would have been impossible to do thanks to much of the race being ridden between buildings.

But what could have been done is have auto-switching a few seconds before the signal dropped out. In Sydney, we almost exclusively had signals die on the down links, not on the uplinks – except for areas with extreme tree coverage.

Race Walking was a bit boring of course. But then again it was in Sydney too. The most exciting part of the Race Walking in Sydney were the complaints from the Tenis people about our helicopter. In the famous Womens event where the Australian got disqualified, I got to speak to the race director that afternoon. He did not know the rules of the event, but knew that she was running.

That afternoon I got a lift from the Olympic Stadium to the Car Park. What was strange was that I was in a car in Sydney that was registered in the USA. Also I was on the Right Hand Side, but in this case there was no steering wheel in front of me. Since it was a Left Hand Drive car. [Our motorcycles were left hand drive too 🙂 ]

I have also been thinking about the dynamics of the Olympics – and I remember two distinct phases on the event. There was the leadup, and then there was the event. I can now look back at things knowing that the two were distinct, but also that there was a few days where we went from leadup to production. It was sort of a ramp up, or actually a ramp down. For me, the Olympics were a quiet time, preceeded by three weeks of hard work.