Vancouver Olympics: Getting ready

The most heard sentence in our house before I head to a major assignment: “Where are my crampons, raincovers, spare batteries, cards.… Sari just hates it — and with a reason. So this time I have thought I spare her — and everyone else — and aim all my packing so that it’ll be ready on Saturday, although I fly out on Monday. Gives me the extra day I always have wanted…

Kind of stupid to fly over to Vancouver — with no snow over there — to the winter olympics… when there is a record amount over where I live. I have been actually training for these olympics myself, especially by doing x‑country, but also some alpine, as well as swimming. The way I work is pretty physical — like someone commented the other day that “do you take your skies with you for the days off?” No, I don’t… well, maybe partly… but mainly it is for the training days with the alpine team. I put my gear on the backpack, take the 400mm into my hands, skies on… and try to keep up with Tanja and Sanni. In Salt Lake City I lost like 4–5 k’s of weight…

Getting the gear over will be a challenge. I decided I go with a bare minimum, ie. 8mm, 14mm, 16–35mm, 24–105mm, 70–200mm, 400mm, 800mm and 1200mm.… Ok, just kidding, as the 800mm is about 14 000 euros — and I do not own one — and the 1200mm (discon­tinued) was something like 130 000 euros when they were still selling them — and I do not own one either. Huge monster, weighs about 18kilos. I have worked with both though, and I have to say, if I had the extra 14 000 I’d know where to spend it.

But all the others I will take with me — along with two Canon EOS 1DMK4’s and one 5Dmk2. Only one computer (and a copy of it on an external harddrive) plus several hard disks and A6 size Wacom. Two audio sets. Multimax remotes. And all kind of this and that…

And all this should be packed into you allowed 20K. Right… not going to happen. But I manage somewhow, I always have. And, as another photo­grapher (Leo Mason from Newsweek)taught me in Athens: experience shows in the fact that you do not carry unnecessary stuff with you. It’s three weeks, you have to maintain yourself fit throughout the compe­tition and not exhaust yourself. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

Been really busy the past month. I covered the European Championships of Figures­kating in Tallinn, Estonia, and that sort of messed up my prepa­ration for the Olympics. We did some image-galleries from there — and actually got quite a decent amount of traffic into my site, something like 160 000 different viewers in five days.

The same will continue from Vancouver. I have been preparing several multi­media pieces for the games and I will show them couple of days before the appropriate compe­tition. So far, it’ll be freestyle, skating, ski jumping… and most probably also X‑country and alpine. But we’ll see… Unfor­tu­nately nothing from the city of Vancouver, as I am stuck on the mountain.

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So stay tuned. I am still thinking about the format of this blog; i.e. should I make a separate blog or just stick to this one or what? A friend asked me yesterday that I wouldn’t do any UPDATES as most of the RSS-readers do not recognize them — and he has a point.

But, if you have any ideas, please let me know. I will also update facebook daily, so look me up over there, if you are interested.

Until next time — from Vancouver.