Rio Olympics Blog — Day Nine: Row, row, row your boat (Part I)

So waking up early on the day after the opening ceremony isn’t the most pleasant thing to do, even if you weren’t at the actual opening ceremony.

You see, you tend to be in a rush, still in that hazy fog and a bit confused and that leads to you forgetting important things — like sunscreen.

*sigh*

Okay, so the sunburn aside, Saturday was the jumping off point for our Olympic coverage. I somehow managed to get myself from the Olympic Park to Lagoa Stadium near Copacabana for a rowing event via this wonderful thing called media transportation.

Thankfully, the bus got me to the stadium well ahead of when I was expecting it to, which gave me more time to figure out where to sit and where to find the mixed zones afterwards to get the necessary interviews.

I was at Lagoa Stadium to cover Anders Weiss and his rowing partner Nareg Guregian’s men’s rowing pair heat race for the Providence Journal. I will say, the stadium was very much par for the course from what I’ve come to expect for media accommodations, which means it was really pretty good. Outdoor seating to watch the finishes was nice. The indoor workroom was good and the mixed areas were relatively quiet and easily accessible.

Unfortunately, Weiss and Guregian failed to automatically advance out of their heat, although their time would have gotten them second in the second heat and third in the third heat. You can my recap for the Journal here. The duo will have one last chance to make the semifinal on Sunday in a race against the other four boats who failed to advance. I’ll be out there again at 9:30 a.m. locally.

But the real fun was trying to file the recap. I thought I would be able to come back to the park, walk to the apartment, change, walk back and finish the recap.

I. Thought. Wrong.

I did that, but it made for extremely tight writing against deadline. It got done, but the lesson has been learned. Sunday I’ll just write the 350-word recap there.

After that was over, I turned back to the Rio2016.com job, which turned out to be not much. I ended up just sitting down a lot and watching the events on the televisions scattered about the room. Hopefully there’s some thing to do Sunday.

But the best part came right at the end. Cat and I got off our Rio2016.com shift at 9 p.m. and we had to find Jasmine to walk back to the apartment. Jasmine had gone to see Venus Williams face Kirsten Flipkens in tennis earlier in the evening. But when we showed up Williams was in a fight in the third set.

Williams ended up falling in a third-set tiebreaker, but it was a pretty cool experience. Despite the Brazilians in attendance failing to understand the etiquette, it was awesome to see a sport that I had only watched on television live and in person. All of it was just so surreal. Probably won’t be the last time I’ll be watching live tennis here.

The games are under way. The people are flooding into the Olympic Park. The fun has started.

Now it’s time to just keep rowing the boat.

Miles walked today: 9.15

Total miles walked: 47.66

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