Saturday, August 23, 2008

奥林匹克 2-自行车

I finally made it to the Olympics! My friend from SuZhou, JunQiang came to Beijing with two tickets to see BMX!


This is probably the one sport that I really was excited about, because the crazy jumps and crashes make for great spectating, because I like biking, and because this is the first time that BMX was in the Olympics. So I was pretty stoked to go see this one. We got up early, traveled to the venue in the South West part of Beijing, got breakfast, and began our Olympic escapade. I knew this would be a great day when I found these two characters outside the venue, getting ready to go in. Yes, they are drinking beers at 8 AM. My kind of crowd!


Inside, it was a complete circus. Not an annoying one, but quite a scene. The course itself looked quite promising. As usual, the Chinese went all out to put on the correct image for the cameras.


We took our seats and enjoyed the competition. A good time was being had by all and there was definitely an air of festivity and leisure.



The competition itself was really amazing and over way too soon. Unfortunately, it was only the semis, but Americans were, of course, dominating. I got no good shots of the action for a couple reasons. Mainly, I got all set up on the first run, aimed my camera at the right spot, was eagerly staring at the viewfinder trying to get that perfect shot, and wound up missing the best crashes of the whole day. It was also really hard to time the shutter to the riders. This is the best I got:


After that, I really stopped taking photos since I didn't want to miss anything. Instead, I took photos of the cheerleaders who came out between heats. (And I wasn't the only one!) By this time, I had a nice buzz going and much to the amusement of the other spectators, enjoyed yelling random things in English at the cheerleaders, who didn't seem to mind the attention.



I saw this festive dude on TV later that same day:

Thus concludes my Beijing 2008 Olympics experience. I was there!!

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