So I head out to the athlete load zone and meet up with my supervisor Claudette. She is from Brazil and has been in Vancouver for the past 3 months and is working at the Olympics before starting her ''real'' job. She was also at the athlete load zone at Thunderbird during the Olympics. I put on my flashy orange & reflective load zone attendant vest and we get installed in our protected ''office'' which is basically a covered compound that Coke uses to store beverages but that we use to sit out from the rain and cold wind.
I then get a brief on our job here in the athletes load zone. Basically every country with a sledge team has a bus. When they are arriving for a game or a practice in their bus, we first need to unlock the entrance gates. Then the bus comes in and unloads the players and coaches & others. The buses they are using are wheelchair accessible, so have ramps the players in wheelchair can use to disembark easily. However some players ignore this and ''jump'' with their wheelchairs! Apparently once a guy feel when trying this, though I wasn't there when it happened. Then the players race down the ramp from the loading zone to the athletes entrance into the building. The ramp encourages them to race!
Then we direct the bus to its parking spot & give the driver their upgrade pass so they can get into the building and either go to the workforce break room or watch ''their'' team. Then we need to let the bus drivers out another locked gate so they can get into the building (they aren't allowed through the athlete or PF (paralympic family) entrance of course!). Then we wait till the next bus comes. Luckily I had my long johns on as well as an extra shirt or 2 to keep me warm as well as my warm mug of hot chocolate. Then when teams start to leave (and we have its approximate leaving time) we need to make sure the bus driver is there, if not we need to try to find them (this never happened though, they were always ready for their teams). And so we need to let the bus driver back into the athlete loading zone compound. Then we need to go unlock a different gate to let the bus out once all the athletes have loaded, and we wave goodbye!
Paralympic athletes are very friendly, they are often having hello to us as the bus enters the compound and saying hello and good morning to us as they pass us. When I arrived in the morning the Canadian team had already arrived for their game, and I missed them later in the afternoon when they left because I was busy letting the bus of Italians out (the Italians built a reputation of being the team that is the slowest to leave, between the time the first player gets on the bus and the last one gets on there is often an hour! Other teams are much faster and all get on within 15mins (or less!). We also had a VIP arrive through the athletes zone. But we don't have anything to do with the VIP arrivals, the police are in charge of them. All we do is make sure no buses are blocking the entrance for the VIP. In this case it is Steven Harper coming to watch Canada's game against Italy (that the Canadians end up winning 4-0). The Italians are a bit sad since apparently several of the goals were because of mistakes, like the goalie scoring on himself or the puck bouncing off the goalie helmet (and yes the goals are normal sized even if the goalies are sitting on the ice). After a lunch break that allows me to warm up and I get snuck inside the rink to watch a bit of a game. They use us a seat fillers; they make us take off our volunteer jackets and put on a non-blue sweater and seat us in the paralympic and athlete seating areas. These are sections of the arena that are not sold to spectators and reserved for those 2 groups that can basically show up to any event whenever they want to watch. So often the seats are not all filled, and they want people to fill them. Since the athlete load zone is not always very busy (once all the buses are there and no one is leaving for a while...) they recruit us. So I got to watch about a period of the game. Sledge hockey is so exciting to watch, the players are amazing, its so much better than normal hockey. The players are very talented, they have 2 sticks with picks at the end and they manage to propel themselves, carry the puck and avoid other players, all at great speed. They have amazing upper body strength too. And the body checks are quite violent also, big smashes!
When my volunteer shift ends around 3:30 I head home and have a quick dinner before heading out to pacific coliseum. Today is the last regular season game for the Giants and I am doing sweeping (since they sponsor my synchro team). So I get to skate out and shovel a bit of snow mid-way through each of the periods. The crowds at the game are the biggest I have ever seen! After the evening of sweeping I head back to my place for some well deserved sleep!
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