I receive a call on the 24th, approximately 9:03 AM.
An extra ticket to the Men’s Cross-Country 4x10 Relay.
In love with my life.
It’s the premiere event of the Games for cross-country skiing, I would argue, topped only by the grueling endurance of the 50 km mass sprint.
The soundless segments of the 4x10 were often our motivation on the last race of the “regular season” -- the Grand Marais race – to keep the mental image of perfect technique in our minds.
Double pole, stride, rest, draft. Fluids, lunch, bibs back on and skating our way to stack ourselves up before the Sections team was named.
To see cross-country skiing, nobody narrating anything for me; I’m watching it, they come by directly twelve times from my vantage point, fresh snow on the ground, fresh snow falling as huge flakes, no more notes as the racers go by me a skate-pole length away.
Those extra centimeters gained from the classic poles come and go with the pushing and jostling into place to see the racers. Sometimes I’m close, the closest one, yelling as loud as I can at the entity of Petter Northug (with ghosts of Alsgaard propelling his glidewax and visions of Bjorn Daehlie and capturing his spirited sprint to the finish) and a cardboard sign to forever be there on camera. Then they are all gone, reemerging around the tricky right-hand corner and it’s a flat sprint in, one last side-step left, maybe forever as a racer, the final straightaway past the fans and Canadian flags and the camera-on-a-track.
And somehow Northug did it.
And somehow I’m being interviewed on NRK news for my (Pasha Kahn’s) sign.
Somehow something tells me that now’s the time to make my once-in-a-lifetime-swag-Olympic-memorabilia: a hat, of all things. DnB NOR (think: the new Cresco) that I think I might be the only Minnesotan to own.
I scoop it right off of the head of a Norwegian, who got it from his brother Eldar Ronning. I cannot verify that it was his brother. I can verify I was standing in the queue waiting for the bus. He says it was his brother? Wrote the name down. Norwegians can be sly. The guy I bought it from was a Norwegian skiing out in Bozeman … so … perhaps either way.
The skiing, being there in person, without access to the big screen or Bob Costas brings back that intense moment of knowing the moment as an athlete. A desire to compete; to ski, to go fast and to go faster than others. That was love then; a requirement, training as an afterthought. Nobody is creating drama. No commercial breaks on course. No TV timeouts in a hotly contested relay.
My concerted efforts to make it to Whistler Olympic Park as a volunteer paid off. People on the Volunteer crew knew how much I wanted to go to a cross-country event.
Nothing but gratitude in return.
Things work out with emotion.
Back to Work, but volunteering, through the fog, to Whistler.
Time is not a concern -- only happiness – to be in love with my life as it unfolds now.
Work ends.
A visitor from Minnesota arrives, freshly arriving from Victoria.
No posts while entertaining guests.
I do my best to show him around Whistler as to the best a quasi-local can.
Adventures begin.
More Norwegians tomorrow.
