Today's rehearsal was due to start a couple of hours after our shift began and we were told that we could come in later, but we found out yesterday that the GB team had 2 hours of training scheduled in the practise halls mid-afternoonish, so I went in early and a couple of us sat on the coaches chairs at the back of the courts to watch them. They had been in the main arena during the day, so their training seemed to consist mainly of sitting down and being physioed, but one of their coaches was wandering around and started to chat to us, and we wound up with free GB pins from him. Pretty good start to the day, really!
We then had a briefing and ran a full dress rehearsal of the first matches of the first day (again, with no players there, so volunteers stepped in and pretended). I also got to mop properly today: exciting times!
At the end of our rehearsal, they ran a ceremonies rehearsal, (silver medals to Joe and Johanna Bloggs from the FOP team, might I add!) however because medals and flowers can't be used until they are actually awarded to players, the team used stopwatches and broccoli instead. I think that I may struggle to ever see broccoli in the same way again. The flag hoisting team were there and they raised 3 GB flags (we can dream!), and we all had to 'rise for the national anthem'.
Despite the names that were read out for the ceremony being variations on Joe Bloggs, the Arena screen seemed to disagree, with Donna Kellogg performing particularly well in the singles (!) and with my favourite players ever, ever, EVER, Gail Emms and Nathan Roberston, winning the mixed. Which devastatingly never actually happened, but at least I have a picture which claims that they did...Olympic spot of the day: Simon Archer in the Wembley canteen.
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