February 1, 2010 Training Day 1.

Just had this link sent to me by a friend. I was interviewed for this article last Thursday.
You always have a funny look when you get your picture taken...

http://lethbridgeherald.com/
Well, spent the morning in our first orientation / training session. Met quite a few USADA DCO's, and DCO's from Norway, the UK and Singapore.
I am starting to get a real feel for how important doping control is at the Olympics. We have been given, the BEST accomodations of all of the working groups. My hotel room is quite frankly one of the nicest hotels I have ever been in. It is right up there with the Kafar Maccabiah in Tel Aviv and Hakodate in Japan. We were told in our orientation that only the IOC executive members have nicer hotel rooms than we do as far as cost.
I have 2 roommates, 2 doping control chaparones that I have yet to meet so I am in a huge hotel room by myself for now.
We go to pick up our accreditation and uniforms this afternoon and the entire centre is reserved just for us, all the DCO's and BCO's (blood collection officers) to pick everthing up and to get our stuff. We have been out off by ourselves a bit but hopefully we wil be able to mingle a bit more with other volunteers. We have "unrestricted access" during the games which means we have access to any venue throughout the games so the security around our accreditation is quite tight. We will see how well this works when the games begin. I will post some pictures of my uniform when I get it.
Tim

Just got back from getting our accreditation and our Olympic uniforms. First, my accreditation will give me unlimited access to ALL outdoor Olympic events in the WOP. We obviously need access to all of the athletes at all times. those codes on my accreditation refer to unlimited access to the following: all outdoor events, Whistler Olympic village residential zones where the athletes stay, Whistler Medals plaza, athlete preparation and warm-up areas, media/press area, and all fields of play. So, I can go watch any and all outdoor events such as bobsleigh, luge etc. at the sliding centre, all downhill skiing events, biathalon, x-country skiing, ski jumping etc. The last minute change that was explained to us was that we had our infinity access taken away at the last minute which would of given us access to all events. But, they did add unlimited transportation in and around Whistler since they are not allowing any private vehicles into Whistler.

Our uniforms are nice. All of the workforce affectionately refer to themselves as the "smurfs" because of the colour but the jacket is very nice. They gave us a toque, 2 longsleeve shirts, a vest, ski pants and a jacket. The ski pants are way too big as you can tell. We also got a bag with a bunch of goodies like, coupons, a bottle of cold-fx, excel gum, a mug, etc.