One day, one venue

I have made a habit over my time covering the Olympics to try and get to lots of different events and venues. Most of the time that involves going from venue to venue in a single day. Yesterday I was at rowing, then on to soccer and then finished up at track. Rarely does it happen that I spend one day in one venue.

Today, however, was that day.

I woke up wanting to head to the Stade de France for some track action. I wanted to see Gabby Douglas compete in the first round of the 200 meters. My hope was to get a quote or two from Gabby after the competition to send to my former colleague, Jeff Lajoie, who works for a paper in her hometown area of Massachusetts. I made my way down to the press mixed zone, where athletes come through after their events to talk to the media. However, Gabby walked right through the mixed zone without talking to anyone (she did do a TV interview in the broadcast mixed zone), so I left without a quote, which was kind of a bummer.

My original plan was to possibly head over to gymnastics to watch some action there and maybe on to a little 3v3 basketball. However, when I looked at the track schedule, I realized there was a lot of great action on the track all day today. 

At the end of the morning session, reigning Olympic champion Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone was set to compete in the opening round of the 400-meter hurdles while prior to that, Grant Holloway opened his Olympics in the 110-meter hurdles. So, I stayed and watched the rest of the morning session and those races were great.

There was a gap of more than four hours between the two sessions at the Stade de France, but I figured I had some things I needed to do. I wrote a story that I needed to get finished, got some lunch, went to the Paris 2024 store outside the gate of the stadium, uploaded some pictures from the last couple of days and attempted to work out a schedule for a few days next week.

The evening session was scheduled to finish off with the men's 100-meter finals, where the fastest man in the world would be determined. After watching the women in the same event last night, I was excited to see the shortest sprint race for the men, so I decided that the Stade de France would be my home for the day.

The good news was, I was able to leave my computer in one spot and therefore had a spot in the media tribune before anyone covering just the night session showed up. There were plenty of other people who were doing the same thing. In fact, I know there are a lot of journalists here in Paris who actually only cover one sport, so they spend the majority of their time in one place. I am not 100 percent sure I could do that, as one of the good things about my job is the variety of sports that I get the chance to cover on a regular basis, be it at the Olympics or on the high school fields across the state of New Hampshire.

I decided that Sunday would be a day I spent in just one venue, which is a rarity in my Olympic experience.