"Super Olympic Fun Time"

To give you a little background, we are ONS flash quote reporters for team handball events. This means we collect quotes via interviewing athletes and coaches or by sitting through press conferences. Sounds pretty simple right? Wrong! And as I give you a sense of what we have been undergoing for training, you will realize that our job (or ‘Super Olympic Fun Time’ as we like to call it) requires a tremendous amount of concentration, precision, teamwork, and efficiency.

Our training began with consecutive days of lectures from the BOCOG for all 400ish volunteers. They touched upon the array of “Super Olympic Fun Time” tasks we must know how to perform, and emphasized the abilities we must contain and utilize. It was important for all of us to hear this even though they pretty much restated all of the practice exercises we completed prior coming to Beijing. If anything, this got us in the right mindset to begin our training at our venues. Not to mention CCTV, one of China’s national news stations, produced a documentary about all of us volunteers and I was on national China TV!!!

After a few days off, we began the training at our venues. Again, it was very dry and we began to worry about the professional of BOCOG and the ONS. Fortunately, our primary ONS Reporter(Thomas from Germany) and our sports information specialist, or SIS,(Cilje from Norway) showed up a few days later and we really began to breakdown the different responsibilities of flash quote reporting. Since we had already studied the basics of our jobs, Thomas and Cilje threw us right into realistic scenarios. As a flash quote reporter, we watch the handball matches from the “press tribune” which is the area designated for media personnel. Upon the conclusion of the match, we make our way down to the “mixed zone” which is basically the players’ walk from the gymnasium to the locker rooms. This is where our interviews take place. The mixed zone is expected to become very hectic especially when the more popular teams are playing. Thomas will typically suggest players to be interviewed, and if they slip by then…..well….journalists will not have the quotes they want and the ONS, as a whole, will be looked down upon. And if that is not enough pressure, we are required to have all of our quotes entered into the computer system just 10 minutes after the athlete is interviewed. Meeting this time deadline is crucial since we will often sit in on the press conference, and late arrivals are simply not let in. When we are required to sit in on a press conference, we again collect quotes from the athletes and coaches but are expected to compile extended statements opposed to brief quotes. We then again enter these quotes into the computer and it must be done within 15 minutes after the conclusion of the press conference. Sorry to run on for so long, but I hope you get a sense of how much information we are responsible for in such a short period of time. And I might add that we cover 6 matches per day!

This sounds like a hefty amount of work, but after spending time in the ONS office and around the venue I could be more excited and ready for “Super Olympic Fun Time.”