Hi,
How are you doing? We finished our camp on Vancouver Island and are now getting ready for the Olympic races! Please see attached pictures of the last week (or visit our website www.twinbiathletes.com). We flew from Vancouver Island to Vancouver and are now in Whistler at the Olympic Village. We had our first training session on the Olympic course yesterday and it happened to be a timed trial (or practice race). I was super psyched with how it went. Skiing is getting faster everyday and I was perfect on the shooting range hitting 10 of 10 targets and shooting both stages (5 shots each) in 23 seconds a piece. It was a good confidence booster and good way to start our last week of training before our first Olympic race on Saturday!
We flew from Vancouver Island to Vancouver on the 6th where we did "processing" at the US Olympic Committee headquarters. We got our credentials, cell phones, and all our clothing for both opening and closing ceremonies as well as podium wear. It is always a fun activity to go through processing with all the teams and athletes. We also had courses on how to deal with the media, security, and scheduling. From there we drove to Whistler's Olympic Village and moved in. It was quite the process getting through security, but the Canadian organizing committee made it as smooth as possible while still making it safe for everyone. Everyone entering and exiting the complex has the go through airport type security as well as having vehicle and bag searches. It is easier and smoother for the athletes, but volunteers and staff get rigorous searches. Security doesn't seem as tight as it was in Torino four years ago, but I'm sure the Secret Service is there, just not as visible. In Torino, we had the SS guys following us around everywhere.
The village is a few kilometers from Whistler and is pretty much separated from everything by several km of trees in every direction. This is mostly for security. They usually have snipers in the trees and hills as well as camera's watching over everything. The village consists of multiple condo units separated and there are usually 2-3 countries per building. Team USA shares a building with Australia. There are also ski jumpers, nordic combined, bobsled, luge, skeleton, cross-country skiing, and of course biathlon are all staying here with us. So far the food is amazingly better than it was in Torino. All of us expected the food to be great in Italy four years ago, but it was not very good. The Italians are some of the best cooks in the world, but we had to leave the Olympic village to get really good Italian food. Luckily the Canadians are doing a great job here and the food is awesome.
NBC stopped by our room the other day and got footage of "the life of an athlete" in our small little rooms. We gave them a quick tour and showed them how we made us of the small space and maximized the space so we still had room to move around and stretch after our training. keep an eye out for that footage. We have a big press conference today a 3pm with media from around the world. This will be our last big press conference before the games start.
Our first race is a sprint race on Saturday at 1pm pacific time. I will let you know when it will be on TV. The forcast is for rain the next five days. Luckily it has been snowing up at the venue. It snowed 6 inches of really wet snow during our training yesterday which made for some interesting conditions. No matter what happens, we are excited to race on saturday and put together a "best ever" performance. As always, thanks again for all your support. Take care and have a great winter.
-Lanny Barnes
US Olympic Biathlon Team
