Olympics 2010!

Day 10

For one week I was an Olympian...ok not an Olympian but a man that got an opportunity to work at the Olympics. Now before I continue I need to say I was in Vancouver the week leading up to the opening ceremonies. After the opening ceremonies I came home but with that said it was an experience that I will never forget and I was just blown away seeing all the in's and out's of NBC, the complete set up, and all the different venues. The atmosphere was also totally amazing, Vancouver was the place to be and to be a part of it was just incredible. Here is my week in a nutshell ok a big nutshell.

Monday:

I left Seattle and drove up to Canada in our satellite truck. After meeting with the Torch Relay coordinators to do a site survey. I pre-park the truck and pre-pulled all our cables so we could cover the Relay for our morning show. It was a pretty easy day except for all the cable pulling I'm guessing I had at least 2 miles of cable running all over the place and the funny thing was some were in the US and some were in Canada. How crazy is that!!

Tuesday: We were live all morning long covering the Torch. It's kind of interesting because this was the only time for these Winter Olympics that the flame would touch US soil. The guy who was chosen to represent the US was Phil Mahre, a 1984 Olympic gold medal skier from Yakima. Here is a picture of him right after his torch was lit.



The flame was in the US for a whole 2 minutes before it returned to Canada.


Here is the flame crossing back into Canada threw the Peace Arch. It pretty much went down 50 yards into the United States and then made a U turn and came right back. Although if you ask me, I think he ran back because he was scared to go through US Customs. I mean how can you clear someone that is carring a Torch with a HUGE FLAME coming out of it!!


Here they are lighting a small cauldron. I'm not the type of person that usually gets into this kind of thing but I have to say it was pretty cool.


After the Torch Relay I rolled all the cable back up and packed everything back into the truck and then drove to Vancouver. After finding the media hotel and putting everything in my room I jumped onto the Sky Train and headed to the Water Front where the NBC's tent was located so I could get all the credentials I would need to go from place to place. I'm not kidding it seemed like you had to have a badge for evey little thing.


Tuesday: I went to the International Broadcast Center (IBC). This is the place where all NBC's stuff is located. It is also the place where CTV is located and the place where Brian Williams did the Nightly News. It was just AMAZING!! They took a convention center and literally transformed it into studio's, edit rooms, work stations, everything you could think of that a tv station would need and more was in this room and it was HUGE!!

This pictures does it really give it justice!!

Here is one of many NBC's Edit bay's. Every feed from every event can get routed through this room. It is mind boggling. There were even a couple stations from Asia that had these pretty cool studios but I was never able to get a picture of them.

Here is our work station. Every NBC affiliate has their own work station or work area.
It isn't usually this big but since the Olympics were so close to the Northwest this year Belo was granted a bigger space. In fact for affiliates, Belo had the 2nd highest working press core there.

Wednesday - I had to drive up to Whistler to set up our platform and make sure it was live shot ready. All I can say is, it was a mess because some how NBC was upconverting our live signal when it didn't need to be cancelling out our audio. After many hours on the phone and talking to NBC's people based in Vancouver and up at Whistler we figured out where it was being upconverted and rerouted it so it was the way it should be. I'm glad to report we were on the air at 2 pm an hour ahead of schedule doing a talk back with Libby Ludlow. Libby was in the 2006 Winter Olympics where she skied the Super G and the Down hill. She was born and raised in Bellevue and KING asked her to be our so called Olympian insider. Here Libby is doing a talk back up at Whistler.

KING decided to rent a condo which was very close to the ski area. I was only there for a short period of time but it looked very nice but a little crowded. Four different news crews were staying there working and spending the night for the whole Olympics.

Thur - Back in Vancouver I had a little free time to do a little shopping and walking around. Here is the MPC (Main Press Center) This is where all the main press conferences are held for the Olympics.

To my surprise I was able to find a gift for everyone. I was a little scared because when it comes to this type of stuff I am usually terrible. I got the boys a towel with the Olympic characterize on them, Kristi and I got a shirt, and I bought Addy a back pack and some of those famous Olympic mittens!

Here are our live shot tents. There were about 10 different tents in a line. We were 3 tents away from the NBC stage. It is where the Today Show did there first 3 shows when they first got to Vancouver and where MSNBC, CNBC and Nightly News did there broadcast from. The Today Show moved up to Grouse mountain after the first 3 days.

Inside our live tent I hate to say it but it was pretty much a plain tent. We had mounted lights but that was pretty much it. I think the nicest thing was you were at least covered from the rain and the wind during your live shots and all the gear was inside instead of laying out in the elements.

Here is the back drop looking outside our live tent. It was actually a very nice back drop the only problem was you could hear all the floater planes land and take off in the harbor.

Here is the same view at night.

Friday - I was Live in Yaletown at a place they called Live City for the Opening Ceremonies. It was one of the busiest day's that I have ever had. I started setting up at 8 am and was live starting at 5 pm and went through our Midnight show, not only that but I had to drive back after that as well. I got back to Seattle and left the station at 4 am. The other thing that stunk was that my camera battery died so I couldn't take any pictures of this event to show you but I will say this even though it was a 20 hour day it was one of the coolest days at work that I ever had!!

Here are just a couple more pictures of our work area.

Here is my boss, Greg with our routing system. He kind of handled all of Belo's feeds making sure that the right things got sent to the right stations at the right time and made sure all the live shots where up when needed.

He was pretty much the pointman between the crews in Vancouver and the stations.

Here is Pete, one of our photographers editing. When it comes to these type of events they are a lot of fun to work but it's also a lot of work. It seems like sometimes you are so busy you forget to take sometime to enjoy it.

Like I mentioned before, I left pretty much 3 hours after the Opening Ceremonies ended but it was just an amazing experience and I'm glad I just got the oppurtunity to do it!