Day 1

Well this will turn out to be a short post. Mostly because watching the opening ceremonies ate away my evening.
Highlights included (in my mind):

• Hydralics engineering fail!
• Nelly...she had very nice...shoes!
• Rain in Vancouver (I was shocked!)
• Georgia participating in the march of nations (Inspiring)

 I'm super tired and have to be on hill at 6:30 tomorrow! Its the mens downhill and its as popular in Europe as the gold medal hockey game is for Canada. Needless to say it will be busy. The hike up to the bleachers is quite aggressive. If your not in at least a moderate amount of physical shape the climb on foot will be very difficult. Who would have thought a mountain would be tough to climb! I will be suggesting heavily that people take the chairlift to the top.

Todays big news as you have all heard I'm sure, was the death of a luge competitor on a practice run. I heard the call come out on the radio and we weren't sure what was really happening for a few minutes. In our hearts we hoped he would be okay but once we heard that they were performing CPR our hopes were severely weakened. The hard fact is that CPR rarely results in a resuscitation. If anyone has seen the news footage, its very clear he wasn't going to survive. He died the moment he hit the steel girder.140km/h was the reported speed I heard. It was a very difficult way to start the games and many of us felt the pressure of our positions weigh down on us.

I watched the opening ceremonies in the lounge at the hotel with a few others. Everyone clapped and cheered when Georgia entered during the march. It must have been incredibly difficult for the team to do that, but they managed it and walked together as a team into that arena. Is there no better way to honor the memory of their team mate than by continuing on the olympic journey and performing at their best for the games?

I hope that the rest of the games remain safe, and that no one; be it athlete, spectator or otherwise needs my attention. Cheers everyone. I hope your tomorrow is better than today. Pictures and more fun type posts to come tomorrow. Promise!