February 14, 2010 Day 14

CANADA WINS GOLD!

What an exciting day. People are so excited everywhere about Alexandre Bilodeau winning Canada's first gold medal at the Olympics and on Canadian soil. He will be getting his gold medal at BC place tomorrow evening.

Well, I worked all day at WOP again for the Nordic Combined event. This is where they do the ski jump in the morning and in the afternoon, they do a 10km cross country race. I almost had to go with the ERV with the gold medalist to his medal ceremony in Whistler. After the event, the gold medalist is always drug tested and we only have a small window if time to complete the testing process before he has to leave for the Whistler Olympic Medal plaza in Whistler Village. It was down to the last 5 mins but everything got done in time. The ERV is a motorhome that is a mobile doping control station. Basically, if the athlete is ready to provide a sample while he is on his way to get his medal, I would process him right there whenever he is ready. The funny thing is I think ERV stands for the "Emergency Relief Vehicle".

I got a first hand look at some of the "commercialism" of the Olympics. All athletes are given sealed and secure, bottled water to drink after they are notified that they have selected for testing however, we were told by the VANOC officials that we had to peel off all of the labels on the Dansani water bottles because the only drink logos that could be on camera was "Coke" even though Dansani is a coke product. The other thing I have learned was the media are ruthless and unreasonable. They were upset that we were taking the Ski jump athletes from yesterday away from the cameras even though it is the athletes choice when they go out and do their press conference and media interviews and pictures. They are like vultures hanging around outside the doping control station and hounding us to hurry up...

Overall, it was a busy day of testing and it will only get busier. After, I took the time to enjoy the mountains and to remind myself where I was.