I can tell people are starting to get the Olympic spirit in Whistler. Flags are going up everywhere and more and more athletes and delegations are arriving. At the bus stop today, we met the head of the Slovenian delegation. She was nice to us because she found out we were doping control.
Some of the operational changes from Beijing include no more of what the athletes called the pee pee dance. This is where the athlete in Beijing would have to do a 360 degree turn to give us a clear an unobstructed view prior to passing of a sample. To address this, they have installed mirrors on 3 sides of the athlete to use a secondary means of ensuring this.
Also, notification of the athletes will be done by DCO's where we have in the past used volunteers that we train on-site on the day of testing. We are doing 500 pre-competition tests int he next week in the athlete villlage. The only problem is each athlete declares or puts on his/her whereabouts form a 1 hour window where they are available for doping control each day and this time is almost always betwen 6:00 am and 7:00 am.
The IOC medical commission is taking anti-doping extremely seriously. They have the authority to verbally ask for a test on any athlete they want or specifically target an athlete suspected of doping and we must accomodate this request. Should be interesting wandering the athlete village trying to notify athletes that thye have been selected for doping control when they are trying to avoid us...
I have included some pictures today, 1 of the Nitalake lodge we are staying in and the other is me under the Swedish flag for Thomas. The picture of the Inukshuk (sp?) is right in Whistler Village. pretty cool.
Well, today was a pretty ordinary day overall. We were mostly stuck inside in meetings all day reviewing and going over all of the testing procedures.
Tomorrow will be great. We will be doing a tour and walkthrough of our testing venue and facility and we will be fully operational Thursday afternoon at 2:00 pm.
No comments:
Post a Comment