Change at the Olympics
I fell fast asleep on the Workforce shuttle this morning. I arrived onsite groggy and dragging my feet, despite getting a free Snickers bar and my ninth-day-of-volunteering gift at check-in. From the get-go, the Spectator Care gang on the whole appeared tired, and the morning seemed to last forever.
After seven straight days of sunshine, winter seemed to be making a return to the Callaghan Valley. There was no bright glowing orb of happiness in the sky today. There was no doffing of jackets. No handing out of sunscreen. It was all kinds of gray, and some time after lunch, the gray became flecked with white.
The return of the cold and the snow is bittersweet. The Nordic venues have been both blessed and plagued by temperature highs like one might expect in April; not February. The sunshine and warmth have been sweetly savored by workers and spectators alike, but day after day over the last week we have watched the walls of snow along the pathways melt alarmingly quickly away. I am personally always happy to see snow falling. At this point, there is no way the base will be recovered but it is still comforting to know that the demise of the entire snowpack will at least be curbed.
On a somewhat related note, weather may cause changes at the Olympics, but the Olympics itself also causes change. I think one of the reasons I am enjoying my time here is because I am surrounded by so many like-minded people. That point was really driven home to me this morning, as I stood on the shuttle that takes us from the Workforce check-in tent to the cross-country and ski jump stadiums. There was a young lady talking to a colleague about her experience. She was describing it in terms of how everyone back home was going on with their lives as normal, but how life for her had sort of stopped and when she went back it wouldn’t be the same. It touched me because I have been feeling the same way. It’s an enormous feeling, and one I’m not quite sure what to do with at this point … but one I am enjoying nonetheless.
in order to become all that we can become. –Max de Pree
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