A very warm Arena and lots of mopping action

We watched the cycling (yes, Team GB!)  again this morning and our (German) flag made its TV debut on the BBC this afternoon. This called for many excited Skype calls to Germany.


The distance between the female cyclists shocked me, as I had time to watch the leaders and the Peleton, go and get ready, and then there were still bikes going past when I left the flat for the station.
I arrived at Wembley to be given a Games Maker journal (see left along with a pin that Team GB gave me because they thought that I was doing a good job) (have no fear, though, the blog will still take priority!). Apparently, we now get incentives on certain days of our shifts, and we have a card to attach to the back of our ID to say when we've got them. Freebies!

Today two extra moppers had been recruited to our team because yesterday we'd had to run from match to match and didn't have a break in 5 hours, despite the heat. We did get more little breaks, but, somehow, however, I managed to get myself on to every single match that went to three ends, so I was on court for over an hour each time!

Because of the heat in the Arena (if you're going, I reiterate: it is boiling even if it's bad weather outside so don't wrap up at all unless you're on an extremely drastic mission to sweat off all of your body weight), there was obviously a lot of sweat action going on (we're talking splatter patterns of sweat which appear with each overhead shot) (glamorous, I know), so this equalled lots of mopping action, and I lost count of the number of times that we had to go on, especially in the men's matches.

I mopped for:

P. Abian (Spain) vs. P. Koukal (Czech Republic) (despite Raj's match going on simultaneously, this was a very good close fought match, and when Koukal lost he was a total sweetie and kissed the London 2012 logo on the floor)
K. R. Juhl & C Pedersen (Denmark) vs. LY. Poon & Ys. Tse (Hong Kong) (I here got my first mopping thank you, courtesy of Kamilla, who is one of my favourite players on the circuit at the moment, and who was absolutely lovely to me, despite leaving the line judge next to me minorly traumatised)
M. Boe & C. Mogensen (Denmark) vs. V. Ivanov & I. Sozonov (Russia) (this was far closer than everyone expected, and it was kind of weirdly reassuring to see how much the player's hands were shaking when they served!)

While I was mopping for my last match, Raj's match was on the court in front of me. And. it .was. so. loud! My friend sent me something the other day about someone trying to sue Justin Bieber for his concert wrecking their hearing, and I'm not exaggerating one bit when I say that I couldn't hear a single word that my umpire said, and I actually came away from it with earache. But the atmosphere was fantastic and it was so good to have a Team GB win after Chris and Immy's nightmare-ish past two days.

I'm working again today, but I'm going to be at a different house for the next three nights, so I'm not sure whether I'll have Internet to get a blog up. I'll write it anyway and then batch post it when I get back to Internet if I don't have it.

Olympic spot of the day: my favourite player, ever, ever, ever, Gail Emms, in the commentary box, air-punching and dancing throughout Raj's third end (as far as I'm concerned, I could spot Usain Bolt in London Waterloo and it would not top this).

Team GB, broccoli and stopwatches.

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.