Cupertino to Newry, Northern Ireland (Olympic Days 1-2)

Our Olympic journey begins today! We catch a late afternoon flight from San Francisco to London (Heathrow) and then connect to a flight to Dublin. From Dublin, we take what is surely the most expensive rental car ever (>US$600 for just 3 days) north to Newry in Northern Ireland.

We woke up at 2:30am local time to begin compensating for the 8 hour time difference between California and Greenwich Mean Time. The added bonus was that we had time to pack since there hadn't been enough time to do that this week.

Speaking of packing, one of the things that we've included in past journals is a list of all of the electronic gear that we are hauling along. Between the three of us, we have:

1 iPad with wireless keyboard

2 Kindle e-readers

3 iPhones

2 iPod

Did I mention that I could hit Apple's world headquarters from my front porch with a brassie? ;-)

Packing was tricky because of the expected weather. Over the past three weeks in the United Kingdom, we've seen temperatures as low as 8-10C (46-50F) and as high as 26-28C (79-82F) with pouring rain our bright sunshine. An added challenge is to make sure that all of the bags weight less than 23kg (50 lbs) so that we don't pay extra for heavy bags. Remember that I have to put all of these Olympic pins somewhere. We decide to bring a bunch of fairly light clothes that can be layered as necessary. Sean, who has been growing like a weed for the past 6 months, discovered that he no longer had any pants that he fit into. Gee, maybe this is why his Mom asked him to try on his clothes last week. His response was "I'll just wear shorts". Beth and I immediately get the mental image of Sean walking around in a cold, driving rain in his shorts. Our guess was that Sean probably wouldn't think that this was such a good idea at that point. So, off to the store Beth and Sean go to correct this problem - good thing we don't get picked up by the airport shuttle until 12:30pm. Finally, we manage to move our stuff around to keep all of the bags under the limit.

Then it was time to sit down and watch the Opening Ceremonies. As always, we enjoyed it very much. Here are some of our favorite moments:

The boys choir singing England's Green and Pleasant Land - I've like this song since I heard it played by Emerson, Lake and Palmer a long, long time ago.

I am sure that the Queen skydiving with James Bond will be the one moment that everyone remembers from this Opening Ceremonies. It was certainly NBC's favorite moment. I liked this too - it showed that Elizabeth has a sense of humor while her later official opening of the Games was quite terse.

I also liked the Doves on bikes segment. Long time Olympic fans will remember that the organizers always use to launch the "Doves of Peace" at the end of the Opening Ceremonies. But as TV quality got better, viewers were able to see some of the doves getting cooked by the newly lit Olympic cauldron. Since then, organizers have tried dove-shaped balloons, but this was much better.

At about the same time, there was an excellent cover of the Beatles song "Come Together" by the band Arctic Monkeys.

This was easily the fastest parade of nations that I've seen since the Olympics expanded to their current size. I had heard that most of the coaches and officials were being excluded to speed things up, but I saw plenty of these people and things still moved along rapidly. Maybe it was the up-tempo music?!

As always, I liked all of the interesting uniforms, from the Bermuda shorts to the flowing robes of some of the Arab nations to the bright colors of the African nations. My award for the most unusual outfits went to the members of the Czech Republic who came into the Olympic stadium wearing shorts and bright blue boots.

I really liked the symbolism of planting the flags of the nations on the hill representing Glastonbury Tor (Tor is a Celtic word meaning hill or rock outcropping).  

Leading up to the Opening Ceremonies, there was a lot of talk about whether US flag bearer, two-time gold medal winning fencer Mariel Zagunis, would dip the flag to the Queen. Ralph Rose, the flag bearer in the 1908 Games in London refused to dip the flag to the King. There is a lot of mythology about this, but the most likely answer is that many of the American athletes had Irish roots and in this Games, Irish athletes were forced to compete for England. Then there were a couple of Olympics where the US did dip the flag, then beginning with the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, they have not dipped the flag. Interestingly, NBC did not mention the talk about whether Mariel would dip the flag and in fact, did not have the cameras on the US team when they got around to the part of the stadium where the Queen was seated. It was only this morning that I read a story saying that the US Olympic committee had instructed Mariel not to dip the flag.

The one moment that really choked me up was when the Amsterdam flag was brought into the stadium (it is called the Amsterdam flag because it was first used at the 1928 Amsterdam Games). The flag bearers were all stellar people including the Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Conductor Daniel Barenboim and Noble Prize winner Leymah Gbowee. Just before they got to the ramp leading to the flagpole, they stopped. Suddenly, former boxer and icon Mohammad Ali gets up. He has already had one major Olympic moment lighting the torch at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games when he was already suffering from Parkinson's disease. Now he has another as his wife helped him reach out and touch the flag as it went by.

We expected some sort of nod to English humor so it was no surprise when the actor who plays Mr. Bean showed up in the orchestra during a bit about Chariots of Fire, a great movie about some of the athletes of the British Olympic team during the 1924 Olympics. I have sort of a love/hate relationship here - I find a lot of it initially really funny, but they tend to run the skits so long that it is nearly painful by the end. But I enjoyed this one.

I also enjoyed the way that football star David Beckham brought the Olympic torch to the stadium in a speedboat. While the torch has been carried by almost every method of transportation imaginable during the torch relay that has preceded the Opening Ceremonies at every Olympics since 1936, this is the first time that I can remember that one of these alternative methods was used to get the torch to the Olympic stadium.

We all enjoyed the musical segment although I must admit that I had never heard of any of the bands after the 1990's. It was nice that the organizers gave a nod to The Beatles with the live performance by Sir Paul McCartney. When he started singing "Hey Jude", I thought "Man, his voice is totally shot", but then I thought he just totally choked up with the magnitude of what was happening and it took him a few minutes to regain his composure. On the other hand, the local talk radio the next day also decided that his voice was shot.

Finally, I thought that the way that they lit the cauldron (and in fact constructed the cauldron) was brilliant. First, I thought that giving the honor of having the kids representing the future of sport light the torch in front of most of the living British Olympic medal winners was a great idea and got around the problem of who to choose to light the torch. I also thought that the way that the individual Copper bowls merged into the Olympic cauldron showed great imagination. I had seen a volunteer marching into the stadium with each team carrying one of these large Copper bowls, but had no idea what they were for. But when I saw them all laid out when the kids lit their torches, I knew what was going to happen - and it was beautiful. In the end, after all the talk about how London would never live up to the Opening Ceremonies put on by the Chinese four years ago, they produced an entertaining and uniquely British Opening Ceremony that people will remember for a long time.

Now on to the business of getting to Europe for the Games. Our shuttle bus came right on time for a really bumpy trip to the airport. We even got there soon enough that we could upgrade our seats to Economy Plus, which provided more legroom that Sean and I could really use. Going through security was the usual adventure when carrying hundreds of Olympic pins. I laughed and told the TSA agents that I would have been shocked if they had not asked to search through my pin bag.

The flight itself was pretty uneventful except for where a 3-year old girl completely melted down when told it was time to go to bed and screamed at the top of her lungs for nearly an hour. Our strategy of getting up at 2:30am seemed to work reasonably well as we were all tired when we got on the plane and were able to get some sleep.

Olympic security was certainly in evidence as our plane was met by a security guy in a flak jacket with machine gun. Since we were getting on another plane to Dublin, Ireland, we were directed into a warren of passageways that were intended to get us to our connecting flight. There are five terminals at Heathrow airport and unfortunately, we were directed by a helpful volunteer to the wrong terminal. This would not have been a big problem except that we had to go through security again - and that meant another search through my pin bag. By the time that they went through all of the pockets in the bag and checked for either drugs or explosive residue (not sure which), we were starting to be concerned that we would miss our connection. Finally, we were directed toward the correct terminal (which involved a bus ride through the bowels of several terminals). From the terminal entrance, we went up a level where we got to go through something called biometric security where you look into a camera and a technician records your image. Then back down a level and into another walk through security (and pin bag check) yet again. Then we went through another biometric checkpoint where they make sure that the person holding the boarding pass still looks like the person who had the boarding pass when they first recorded the picture. By this time, we were very secure and getting a little late to board our plane. We looked at the departure board and were greeted by a message saying "Wait at Gate 8". Hmm, gate 8 turned out to be gates 8a, 8b, 8c, 8d and 8e; none of which were boarding our flight. After sitting there until after the plane was supposed to have begun boarding, our gate was changed to 7, where we waited some more. Eventually, we were told that an engineer was on board making repairs (something no one wants to hear when getting on a plane) and that we would be told something when they had a departure time. After about an hour, we were told that we would be boarding - and were directed down a staircase onto a bus. The bus took us out onto the runway to what looked like an airplane parking lot. I guess this is how the airport deals with having more planes than they have available gates. This particular British Airways flight had a special paint job for the Olympics that we thought was designed to look like a dove.

The flight was only about a hour, most of which I spent looking at the inside of my eyelids. We got our bags and went to Hertz to get our car. There was a problem - we think it was because we were going to drop the car in Belfast, Northern Ireland rather than bring it back to Dublin.  After a while on the phone, the agent told us to walk across to the car park, walk all the way to the left and a man would be waiting for us with the car. We found the location and waited...and waited. Finally a guy brings a dripping wet car. He leaves and we realize that the car did not include the GPS direction system we paid for - and we got the key stuck in the ignition and could not get it out. Back to the rental counter. He gave us a GPS system and told us to wiggle the steering wheel and it would come out. Back to the car and off we went.

Driving on the "wrong" side of the road hasn't gotten any less nerve-wracking than the last time I did it in New Zealand in 1995. I remembered not to get a car with a manual transmission - I can drive a car with a stick, but not with the opposite hand! But I have a lot of trouble figuring out where left side of our car is - I'm constantly going off the left side of the road. Then there are the traffic circles. Like the ones in Massachusetts that I grew up with, the cars in the circle have right-of-way. Unlike those, the cars are going clockwise. I also can't figure out what the speed limit is. I thought it was 100 km/hr (62 miles/hr), but cars were flying past me in the fast lane. Even at 120 km/hr (~75 miles/hr), most cars are passing us. Oh well, I'm happy to putter along in the slow lane as long as no one is sitting on my bumper.

As we drive, we start to understand the Irish weather. We had been following the weekly weather in Newry and it looked like it was raining an average of six out of every seven days. I was picturing weather something like Seattle with weeks and weeks of gloom when it rains, it lasts for days. But it quickly becomes clear that this is not what happens in Ireland. We go through three or four cloudbursts followed shortly by sunshine. So, if you don't like the weather, just wait.

The most interesting thing to happen was when we crossed over the border from the Republic of Ireland into Northern Ireland (one of the four parts of the United Kingdom with Scotland, Wales and England). We expected a customs checkpoint or some huge sign saying "Now Entering Northern Ireland". No, the only indication that we had left Ireland was a small sign that said "Distances now shown in Miles". Hmm, I thought that the United Kingdom went metric some years ago??

Despite the driving difficulties, we make good time. It takes us only a little over one hour to get to Newry. Our GPS system cannot seem to deal with a street address with no street number. Fortunately, my mother sent driving directions after she arrived in Newry and those worked fine.

We walk into the lobby of the Canal Court Hotel and hold the door for a guy coming in behind us. I am wearing a hat I bought in Sydney that is covered with Olympic team pins. After I check in, the guy following us in asks if I am Steve Robie. It turns out that this is Walter Malcomson, who owns the bed and breakfast. He has been sent to find us and guide us back to the B&B to pick up Mom for our trip to dinner.

We quickly change clothes then head back out and meet Walter who is sitting in the hotel restaurant drinking coffee. The B&B is pretty easy to get to except for making a righthand turn across the A1 motorway - the  main route between Dublin and Belfast. We greet my mother (it has been 2 years since we have seen her) and her friends Dick Thompson and his wife Jane and Dick's son Steve and his wife as well as Walter's wife Joan then head out for our first experience driving in the country.

The first thing that happened was that I missed a turn I was supposed to take and my mom said, no worries, we can take the next right. We take the right and keep driving and driving. Things are not looking familiar to my Mom who has been over this route many times. We look at the GPS system and it shows us in the middle of a large blank area with no roads (including the one that I am trying hard to stay on). Finally, we reverse course, go back to the correct turn and eventually make it to our destination, the home of Mom's friend Mourna Crozier called Lisnacreevy House. Mourna and her late husband rescued this abandoned estate many years ago and have been restoring the house and rest of the property ever since. It actually gave us a fair idea of what one of the estates would have been like during the time of the Great Famine.

Mourna knew about my Olympic obsession so she wanted to know what we thought of the Opening Ceremonies. We told her that we enjoyed it very much and she agreed - saying that she stayed up to watch until it ended after 1am.

Mourna's son Matthew gave us a tour of some of the outbuildings and then we sat down to an excellent meal. Conversation was wide-ranging including topics like Irish anthropology and the poor state of American politics. But by the end of the evening, Beth and I were having definite difficulty staying awake. I didn't want to try Braille driving so we said our goodbyes (I gave Mourna one of my US Olympic team pins) and then headed back to Newry for the evening. It has been a great, but very long day.

Cupertino (Olympic Day 0)

In a possibly futile attempt to avoid jet-lag, we woke up at 4:30am yesterday, 3:30am today and will wake up at 2:30am tomorrow. The goal is that we will be tired enough when we get on our airplane tomorrow at 4:30pm that we will be able to sleep. We arrive in Dublin, Ireland around 2pm local time (assuming that we do not get stuck in London's Heathrow airport) on Sunday and it will be a really long day if we don't get some sleep on the plane.

A few random thoughts while going through the gazillion things that I still have to do before we get on the plane:

I don't remember there being so many events taking place before the Opening Ceremonies at previous Olympics, but I am enjoying watching all of the football (soccer for my American readers) matches. I know that most Americans have no interest or knowledge of football, but I have always enjoyed watching it. It is interesting to see how one set of rules have generated so many different styles of play. I have to admit that I prefer Women's football because most of the best players in the world are there. On the other hand, FIFA, the football federation, has decided that the quality of Olympic football should not compete with the quality of World Cup football. To achieve this, teams attending the Olympics can only use three players over the age of 25. To me, this is like watching a minor league ice hockey all-star game - the talent is good, but not world class.

I am very much looking forward to seeing the Opening Ceremonies later today at whatever time NBC chooses to pretend it is actually occurring. We have attended four Opening Ceremonies (Lillehammer, Atlanta, Nagano and Vancouver) and have had a great time each time. While I like the ceremony (parade of nations, Amsterdam flag, athletes and coaches oaths, etc), what I really enjoy is the first, or artistic part of the program. It is fascinating to see what the organizing committee and its artistic director want the rest of the world to learn about their city and country. Anyone who remembers the Opening Ceremonies in Beijing know what I'm talking about. The message was very clear - China was doing great things before most current countries even existed and guess what, we're back. Vancouver's message was very different - we are a melting pot of people who love sport and don't take ourselves very seriously.

So what will London's Opening Ceremony tell us about London and the rest of the country? What in its long history is important enough to spend precious time on? Will there be mention of The Beatles, Monty Python, Dr. Who, Harry Potter? I can't wait to find out.

Of course, the other big secret in the Opening Ceremonies is who is going to light the Olympic Flame. The internet is ablaze with guesses. Today I heard Phil Collins was going to light the flame. Personally, I think that there is a bigger chance of Lord Voldemort doing it, but you never know. My personal preference is Roger Bannister, the first man to break 4 minutes in the mile. We'll find out soon.

About Pins

After more than a year of planning, we are getting close to the start of our Olympic trip. But before we start, I thought that I would talk about how I began collecting Olympic pins and why, on any given day at the Olympics, I'll be wearing something like 5kg (11 lbs) of Olympic lapel pins!

The start of my collecting habit began many, many years ago with my grandmother Dorothy. Dorothy, who incidentally lived in London while I was growing up, believed that everyone should have a collection of some sort. She collected stamps and she and her husband Dan collected beer steins and copper pots. So, beginning around the time that I was perhaps 8 or 9, she began sending me First Day Covers from England. A First Day Cover is a special envelope and cancelation from the ceremonies held to commemorate the first day that a stamp is put into circulation. I remember in particular a large cover of the Bayeux Tapestry to commemorate the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings where the Normans defeated the Saxons to gain control of England. This was in 1966. She also opened an account for me with a company called Fleetwood that would automatically send a couple US or United Nations First Day Covers to me each month. My parents continued this subscription after Dorothy died. So, by the time that I got ready to attend my first Olympics in 1980, collecting was already a habit.

The second step in my transformation into a "pinhead" occurred when I attended my first Olympic Games in 1980. At that point, I was a graduate student in Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY - about four hours drive from the tiny village of Lake Placid, host of the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. This was the closest that the Olympics had ever been to where I lived so myself, my girlfriend (now wife) Beth and several of my roommates made plans to attend. Grad students are not the most affluent of people. In fact, our Research or Teaching assistantships bare paid enough for tuition, room & board, pizza and beer (not necessarily in that order of priority) so careful planning was required. To maximize our "Olympic exposure" while minimizing our costs, we decided that we would get up around 3-4 in the morning, drive the four hours to Lake Placid, attend 3 events, get in the car and drive home, arriving back in Troy around 2am the following day. Some of my experimental runs required me to be awake for up to 36 hours straight so this did not seem totally crazy to us. The three events (first run of Men's Giant Slalom, the Ski Jumping portion of the Nordic Combined competition and an Ice Hockey Game between Finland and the powerful Soviet Union team) were chosen because the ticket prices (except for hockey) were low and because we thought that we would be able to get from one event to the next without missing too much.

The first part of the plan worked perfectly. We got to the Olympic parking lot near the Interstate in plenty of time to get on a bus for the ride to our first event. Once at the venue, there was a small issue during the climb through the woods up a frozen stream to get to a good vantage point on the Giant Slalom course. At one point, Beth fell on the ice and slid well down the mountain before coming to a stop against a small tree (amazingly, she married me anyway), but the plan was generally working....until the event ended. We went to the place where we were told that the bus would take us to Ski Jumping and waited...and waited...and waited. We finally realized that not only had we missed the beginning of the Ski Jumping, we had missed the whole event. So when a bus finally arrived that was going into the village of Lake Placid, we jumped on. The Ice Hockey venue was right down the street, but we had about 4 hours before the gates opened so we decided to buy a few Olympic souvenirs and then walk down to take a look at the speed skating oval. I was walking along when a young woman wearing Olympic credentials around her neck walked up to my roommate Paul and pointed at an Olympic lapel pin of the Lake Placid mascot Roni the Raccoon that he had on his jacket. It was clear that she did not speak English, but it was also clear that she wanted that pin and that she wanted to trade a pin to get it. Paul had just bought the mascot pin at a store down the street for $5 so he jumped at the chance to get a more exotic one. We later concluded that the woman was a Figure Skater from the Soviet Union and that the pin was from the Soviet Skating championships.

I am not a very outgoing guy, so I thought that this was great! All I had to do was wear a bunch of Olympic pins on my coat and people from all over the world (especially athletes) would come up and talk with me. Well, it was a little more complicated than that, but this was the start. Because of that initial contact with the Soviet figure skater, I have concentrated on collecting Olympic team pins and now have literally thousands of these pins. I generally try to collect dated team pins from each of the Olympics we've attended. However, there are a few specific countries for which I try to collect all of their pins. Those countries are Hungary, Czech Republic, Great Britain, Portugal and Taiwan (known in Olympic circles as Chinese Taipei). These countries have either produced pins for many years or have kept the same design for many years. For example, the Chinese Taipei pins are always large horizontal rectangles with the Olympic logo on the left and the National Olympic Committee's logo on the right:

 Team pins were originally created as a type of "ice-breaker" in the Olympic Village to give athletes a reason to meet athletes from other countries. Through the 1990's, it was very easy to trade pins with athletes. Then came 9/11 and everything changed. The Olympic Village is now a sort of armed fortress designed to keep the athletes secure and people like me away. This makes it very difficult to meet athletes to trade. So that leaves only a few options to keep my collection going. I can send money to each National Olympic Committee (NOCs) and hope that they send me some pins or I can buy the pins from traders who have somehow gained access to the Olympic Village. I certainly buy a lot of pins from other collectors, but I still get a thrill when I receive a package of pins from one of the NOCs. Here are a few dated London team pins that I've received so far:

 

While the goal was always to trade pins with athletes, wearing hundreds of pins at a time has attracted lots of other spectators over the years as well. Some just want to get pictures with "the pin guy". Some are collectors and want to trade. But these days, I get the most satisfaction from just handing a pin to a little kid who is staring at me like I'm some sort of metal-clad space alien. In fact, I bring hundreds of pins specifically to give them away. Just a smile from a child is enough for me, but sometimes these small gestures result in more. In Pinerolo (near Turin, Italy), our family walked past a women with her three kids aged perhaps 6-12 years old. I gave all three of the kids pins. We kept walking and several minutes later, the woman suddenly runs up behind us. As we understood it, she and her husband owned a store that sold, among other things, Swiss knifes. She gave us a hat with a Swiss flag on it in thanks for our kindness to her kids.

Another time, we were in one of the serpentine security lines to get into a venue and we would pass by the same people over and over as we worked our way through the line. One particular boy stared at me every time we went by. After the third or fourth time, I handed the boy a pin on his way by. Since our lines were going in opposite directions, he had no chance to react. But the next we passed, the boy smiled - and a man in a suit slightly behind the boy later handed me a pin. It turned out that he was an IOC (International Olympic Committee) official who had seen the whole exchange and wanted to give me one of their very hard to get pins in appreciation!

In case you are interested, the past journals that I've linked on this site are filled with many more experiences that we have had just because of these small pieces of metal. I hope that you'll read about many more over the next three weeks. In the meantime, I'll be spending a lot of time over the next week figuring out which of my thousands of Olympic pins to bring with me to Europe. Stay tuned!

Warm-up for London

For the last few weeks, we've been warming up for the Olympics by watching the U.S. Olympic team trials for Track and Field, Swimming, and Diving. Yesterday, we got to see one in person as we attended the Men's Gymnastics team trial final at the HP Pavilion in nearby San Jose. We are quite familiar with this venue as this is where the San Jose Sharks ice hockey team plays.

My apologies for the picture. US Gymnastics policy states that pictures taken are for personal use only. Fine, I wasn't planning on selling them anyway. They go on to say that any camera with detachable lenses are prohibited as are cameras with focal lengths of more than 35mm. I guess that they were worried that I'd get great pictures of the tops of gymnasts heads from my prime vantage point halfway up the upper bowl of the arena. I hope that this is not the policy in London...

The top 15 gymnasts in the US are here to try to punch their ticket to London. They are competing on six apparatuses: High Bar, Pommel Horse, Parallel Bars, Vault, Rings and Floor exercises. The gymnasts are in groups of five. Each group compete on the same apparatus and then the group moves on to the next one. When we've attended Gymnastics at the Olympics, we've had a hard time following what is going on because six athletes are competing simultaneously. A cheer would go up in some part of the arena and a score would be posted, but we had trouble figuring out what was happening where. Today is much easier because even though there are three separate groups, only one athlete at a time is competing. The Floor exercises are going on directly in front of us and the Vault is on the opposite side of the arena. The Pommel horse and Rings are to our left and the High bar and Parallel bars are to our right. Surrounding all of the apparatus are the judges who are following every move. It appears every judge has a different task. For example, there are three judges seated on one side of the Floor exercise floor and others on the corners. The judges on the corners are watching to make sure that no one steps outside the boundaries during their tumbling runs. If anyone steps out, the judge raises a yellow flag to let the judges on the side (who are scoring the routines) know that a deduction is in order. There are also a bunch of people who are responsible for setting up each apparatus for each apparatus. Two people rush over and adjust the height of the Pommel horse to match each athlete's preferences. Another guy puts chalk dust on the parallel bars after each routine. Another guy is responsible for stopping any swing in the rings before each routine.

We know that people have come to these trials from all over the country. In fact, we heard that the coaches of the powerful Japanese team have come to scout the US team. But the thing that surprises me the most is how many kids are in the audience. Every gymnastics club in Northern California must be here in addition to a number of bigger clubs from other parts of the country.

After two rotations (each group completes the apparatus and then rotates to the next one), the race to London has devolved into a race not to not mess up. We see one athlete after another fall off an apparatus, especially on the Pommel horse where everyone seems to have problems. When someone falls off, they have 30 seconds to rechalk and then get back on. But the deduction is 1 point plus whatever skill they were doing at the time. This is a serious penalty because their maximum possible score will go from perhaps 17 (degree of difficulty plus 10 for the performance) down to maybe 15.5 - and it is really difficult to do a perfect performance after you've just been slammed into the mat from the top of the High bar. More typically, you score perhaps 12-13 points and lose 3+ points to the leaders. This can be enough to drop you one place in the standings - critical when only 5 of these 15 men are going to London.

It is really hard to be good on all six apparatuses. The two athletes having the best day are Danell Leyva from Miami, FL and John Orozco from New York City, NY. They finished 1-2 at the Visa National Gymnastics Championships three weeks ago and were both in the top three during the preliminaries on Thursday.  Even when they are not great on an apparatus, they are still scoring in the mid-14's or higher.

After the first rotation, we noticed that there are not five athletes in each group. The odd man out is Sam Mikulak, the NCAA champion from the University of Michigan. Sam had finished 3rd in the two rounds at the Visa Nationals and won the preliminary round here. It turns out that he badly sprained his ankle on the Vault in the preliminary. This is after a horrific injury last year when he broke both ankles during a Floor exercises routine. He does not want to risk further injury even though he knows that he is risking a nearly certain spot on the team by not competing.  It helps that both of Sam's parents are former gymnasts and his father is now on Orthopedic surgeon. Apparently father and son came to some sort of compromise because Sam does compete on the Pommel horse and scores a respectable 14.4 despite not being able to put full pressure on one foot.

Being injured seems to go with the territory in Gymnastics. Several of the athletes have heavily taped ankles and feet. In fact, it is not just the competitors. We see perhaps a dozen spectators walking around with those "exo-skeletons" knee braces that you often see skiers wearing after they have torn ligaments as well as a number of people on crutches.

The battle between Leyva and Orozco goes back and forth. After Leyva beats Orozco in the High bar, Orozco beats Leyva in Pommel horse, Rings and Vault to take the lead by perhaps 0.5 points (out of more than 350 points) going into the final rotation on the Parallel bars. Leyva scores a 15.850 to put the pressure back on Orozco and John can only respond with a 14.350 to pull out the win. We find out later than Orozco had severe hand cramps during his routine and could  not let go of the bar to make his release moves. But honestly, it was clear that both of these athletes were going to make the team.

The more interesting battle is between Johnathan Horton, Chris Brooks, Jake Dalton, Paul Ruggeri and C.J. Maestas - the guys on the selection bubble. US Gymnastics has announced that the top two will automatically make the team, but the other three places on the team, while taking the trial into account will also consider which athletes will give the US the strongest team in the all-around competition. This may bring Sam Mikaluk back into contention and knock another of these guys on the bubble out. So every performance is critical and the pressure is getting to some of them. Ruggeri gets a 13.100 on the Pommel horse in the 5th rotation and follows it up with a 13.400 on the Rings to finish 6th. Horton, gets a 14.950 on the High bar and a 14.600 on the Floor exercises, but managed to hold onto 3rd. On the other hand, Chris Brooks scores a 15.750 on the High bar and 15.300 on the Floor exercises to move up from 5th to 4th.

At the end, the President of US Gymnastics announces that Leyva and Orozco have made the team resulting in a standing ovation from the 10,000+ spectators. The other athletes will have to wait until tonight to see who the other three team members will be. And for us, we've only got one more month until London!

Some random observations:

No successful Gymnast can be allergic to chalk dust because they seem to bathe in the stuff. They put it on the hands (Pommel horse, Rings, High bar, Parallel bars), armpits (Parallel bars) and feet (Floor exercises and Vault) so that they don't slip during their routines.

We see a number of large groups of people all wearing the same shirts. These are the families of the athletes. For these people, the trials is a destination that they have been traveling toward for a very long time. It is one thing for an athlete to have enough love of the sport and drive to spend the countless hours in the gym required to make this dream come true. But for me, more impressive is the time, money and personal sacrifice that the parents and grandparents of these athletes provide to support their children's or grandchildren's dream.

If you ask most people about Men's Gymnastics, they think of Rings - the picture of a guy doing an Iron Cross where his arms are stretched out horizontally while keeping his body vertical to form a cross.  But I found the High bar more exciting. Most people would have trouble doing a Giant where you hold onto the bar and swing around with your body stretched straight out. Imagine doing it with only one arm. Or imagine letting go of the bar on the way up, doing a couple twists and turns in the air and then catching the bar on the way back down. I could not believe some of the routines that I saw.

Final Note: US Gymnastics just announced that Leyva and Orozco will be joined by Jonathan Horton, Jake Dalton...and Sam Mikulak on the Olympic team. Congratulations and best wishes to all of them in London.