As you may know if you’ve kept tabs on this blog since I started writing it, I took time away from my BBC job in the UK back in 2010 specifically to work over in Vancouver at the last Winter games. I’ve got a slight obsession with major sporting events. Walking into the London 2012 Olympic Park that day with my heavy trolley was quite special.

What was just as special was that I’d be working for the BBC. The host broadcaster. Number 1 in the list of broadcasters for London 2012. All those long hours, nights, missing out on my other passions, music and sport, seemed worth it to be here in this job.

I finally reached the BBC offices and basked in the freezing air conditioning. The other members of our team were starting to assemble. We were there to serve BBC Nations & Regions, the parts of the BBC which offers local content whether you’re in Wales, Scotland, the North East, the South West, or East Yorkshire (!). My job was to film and edit specific material for all of the 12 English regions, along with my assigned reporter, Tanya Arnold from BBC Look North.

I’d been interviewed for the job back in September after initially interviewing successfully for a job with the Olympic Broadcasting Service in early June. OBS are the company who film all of the sport, they work specifically for the International Olympic Committee at every games.  They provide a feed of every single piece of action to all of the broadcasters around the world, who then add commentary and analysis from their purpose-built studios and offices around the Olympic Park.  That job sounded brilliant, but being part of the OBS team has its downsides. Because of the need to specialise in each sport, a camera operator may find themselves tied to one venue. If that’s athletics then quids in, but it may equally be Greco-Roman wrestling (no offence to all you wrestlers out there of course, but it’s not the focus of national interest in Britain).  The other trouble I’d had was that accepting the job with OBS may have meant that I would need to leave the BBC, which was a big decision to make. So, I held on hoping that I may be allowed either to take up the OBS role on unpaid leave, or that something at the BBC would eventually come up. So when I managed to get the Nations & Regions job at the BBC it was a huge weight off my shoulders – I would be part of London 2012.

And not just part, the job required me to flit between lots of different venues gathering material, rather than be fixed at one. My accreditation was ‘ALL’, the golden ticket. I could access every single venue across London from Wimbledon, to the ExCel, to the Olympic Stadium.

It sounds brilliant, but there’s obviously a lot of work to do and getting the time to hop around watching sport is not really an option. You take what you can get in the short times you have between filming jobs, and often miss what everyone else is getting excited about. I probably watched less TV during the Olympics than I would do in a normal 2 weeks.

However, there were some highlights! I totally lucked out on a few occasions, sometimes when working, sometimes when having the evening off in the right part of London. Here are some of those special moments…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We arrived at Wimbledon after slogging across London with the camera equipment in order to interview the GB interest in the tennis: Andy and Jamie Murray in the men’s doubles; Laura Robson and Heather Watson in the women’s doubles; and Elena Baltacha in the women’s singles. I’d been at Wimbledon for the All England Championships at the start of the month and have worked there before but I’ve never been anywhere near centre court when a match is being played. We interviewed Elena after her 1st round match and I needed to feed the interview back to the International Broadcast Centre. I had been told that the feed point was on centre court, so I dashed off there following the signs for ‘Mixed Zone’ (the area where athletes are interviewed immediately post-match).  On arriving it was apparent that a match was being played so I waited for a break in play to enter the arena.

It was exciting to even get in there so I was blown away find that the match being played involved Roger Federer. The mixed zone was literally on the front row, the seats that you never get unless you have serious cash. I sat there, feeding the interview down the line, watching the greatest tennis player of all time steamroller his way into the 2nd round.

As if that wasn’t enough, he finished the game and immediately headed straight for me! Having not been in the mixed zone before I didn’t realise why until the NBC man next to me called him over for an interview. I also got a taste of how popular he is when the entire block of spectators rushed down and tried to get autographs.

I was virtually crushed by Federer fans waving oversized tennis balls and felt tip markers. Being the nice guy he is he came over and signed a few, reaching around my camera lens as I filmed him.

Not being a full time member of the BBC Sport team, I’d never expected to be right in the thick of the action when the gold medals came in, but this day turned out to be one of the best of my career so far. We were dispatched to the men’s double trap shooting; qualification in the morning, finals in the afternoon at the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich.  In the early stages of the games when so much competition is happening, BBC Sport sometimes run out of cameras and so we were being used to cover the shortfall,  and, as a result, were the only BBC crew there in the morning. I took up residence in the mixed zone and filmed the early rounds, feeding my material back to the IBC as I shot it. One of the more surreal experiences was sitting down to have lunch straight after the 2nd round to see my shots of Peter Wilson plastered over the headline sequence on the BBC1 afternoon Olympics show (yes, they actually showed shooting on BBC1 that day!)

After a fairly quiet day, Tanya and I went up to the Olympic Stadium to film some pieces to camera for a documentary about Jessica Ennis’ preparations for the Olympics. Little did we know that it was going to be the greatest night ever for British athletics. The atmosphere throughout the whole night built into the most spectacular crescendo of noise for Mo Farah’s 10,000m win. The first 20 laps were a Mo-led mexican wave of noise as spectators stood up to cheers him on as he went past. the last 5 laps he had everyone on their feet and when he kicked out down the finishing straight the noise was immense. I will never experience anything like that again. Superb.

We did our piece to camera from the camera platform overlooking the medal podium; you can see that in the documentary ‘Jessica Ennis: Golden Girl’ which, incidentally is a great watch. Well done to the team at BBC Leeds who put it together.

In the morning, I’d been up at the BBC studio to interview Jess Ennis for BBC Leeds, BBC News and Newsround as well as another athletics hero, long jumper Greg Rutherford and two members of the victorious women’s team sprint cycling team.

The day then got even better as virtually the entire rowing team had come over to the Olympic Park following the completion of their events. They came through the BBC studio to sit on the sofa for a chat, and as they left, we grabbed them for interviews with the regional TV stations in mind. I think I shook the hands of 14 gold medallists that morning.

The day ended with an evening off and my thoughts immediately turned to the stadium and the 100m final. We sneaked back up to the same camera platform we’d filmed from the night before and managed to catch the night’s athletics.

As amazing as it was to watch the 100m final live, it wasn’t quite as special as the previous night. Still, I was there!

These days merge as a single experience because I don’t think I stopped for 24 hours! The Saturday had started early with another meeting to film the rowing team in the Olympic Village, but then had been all about mountain biking at Hadleigh Farm in Essex. We went up to the site to try and find the friends and family of Annie Last, the only GB woman competing that day. It turned out to be a tricky one. Nobody we met had any contacts for the family, and the site was huge.

Still, with a positive attitude I set about wandering through the crowds to try and find them. I’d all but given up when I spotted a huge contingent of fans at the summit of one of the many ascents on the course.  I shouted over the barriers and got their attention and found out that they were indeed who we were looking for and that there were tonnes of them! It made great TV, we interviewed mum, dad, brother, school friends and even Grandma who was local to the area and chuffed to bits to see her granddaughter competing at the Olympics.

We headed back into London after filing the footage and after a bit of editing decided to head over to the stadium to catch Mo Farah’s second attempt at gold, the 5000m final. As with ‘Super Saturday’ the atmosphere was immense. The whole nation seemed to be willing Mo to win. I know there were some great achievements throughout the games, but for me his stood out as the most exciting and captivating. Maybe it was the fact that I was there!

The next morning, I again headed to the BBC studio and interviewed Mo along with fellow gold medalist, Luke Campbell (from my hometown of Hull!). The crowd below the balcony were loving it, all doing the ‘Mo-bot’ and chanting his name. I’ll never forget that either.

That night we watched the closing ceremony with a few beers. It seemed surreal that it was all over. I expect that those 2 and a bit weeks will be the highlight of my career but, you never know, something could top it! It was fantastic and I was privileged to have the experience. Although I expect people all around Britain have their stories of where they were for certain moments, and there are parts I wish I had seen on the TV which I’m only just catching up on now (thanks to the brilliant work by my colleagues at BBC online), It was a unique place to be for the only home Olympics I expect I’ll ever see. I hope to do it again at a future Olympics, but first up is London 2012 Paralympics which start in a few days. I’ll be working for the same IPC team that I joined for Vancouver 2010. It promises to be just as special.

BBC Ten o’clock news lead story, Winsom Green murders

The first problem I spotted was that the bike I had rented over in Canada cost about the same as the car I had sold in the UK a few months prior. The second was that I had been used to hopping on a chairlift or gondola to get up to the top of the mountain, bypassing all of that pedalling nonsense I’d previously associated with mountain biking, and your average British trail park involves powering yourself up as well as down.

Still, I managed to get the money together for a decent bike (not to the same specifications I might add, the main sacrifice was rear suspension), and last week I solved the pedalling issue by driving to the French Alps with three friends to enjoy some lift assisted riding.

The friends in question included ‘Vine-o’, who I soon found out had near legendary status in the resort. He’d been a few times before and there were even videos of him on the internet flailing his back wheel over cliff edges. On arrival, he was greeted enthusiastically by all the guides, whereas James, who’d been almost the same number of times, was afforded a brief handshake and manly nod (getting your back end out, it seems, gets you attention amongst mountain bike guides). The third of the three amigos was Diego. He’d brought two bikes and a tool box which proved useful later in the week.

I sensed that my 2 days experience with bikes on actual mountains may not be enough for the flying start I was hoping for. Everyone seemed very serious and extreme. In a conversation about mountains over dinner on the first night, I mentioned to our guide Ben that I had recently walked the Yorkshire 3 peaks challenge. He went on to tell me about sleeping the night on the Matterhorn with no sleeping bag. You get the picture.

Torrential rain on the first day was a bit of an evener in that no one really wanted to go out, but in the two trails we rode I managed to fall off the bike about a dozen times. It was way more rocky and slippery than I had previously experienced (even though one of my Whistler days was wet), and the hard tail bike was proving hard on my tail, as well as various other parts of my body.

As the week progressed I became more confident and the riding was stunning. The single track trails rip through the forest and you can descend for hours. The variation is massive and you find yourself on steep, technical, rocky descents along with fast and flowing forest trails all in the same run. 

Being near the back of the pack does have it’s disadvantages. You frequently find yourself arriving at the bottom of the run and setting off immediately, giving you no time to have a breather or admire the views. However, guiding is the only way forward. I took a break from it one morning and spent a lot of time scratching my head over routes and getting held up by herds of goats.

Later in the week we rode an amazing backcountry route up to Mont Jovet via La Plagne. It included about 800 meters of climbing, 30 miles of riding and lifts and a half hour train journey home from Moutiers at the end of the day.  It was a mammoth trip which ended in with my rear wheel broken. Thankfully, Diego lent me his spare bike on the last day!  Despite this, I concluded that the best trails were all over on La Plagne. I think it’s because it dried out after rain much quicker and the trails had experienced less traffic so weren’t as broken up.

The break up of the trails does seem to be a cause for concern. The guides had a meeting in the week with local hiking groups, some of whom do not like the fact that
mountain bikers and walkers share the trails. This is understandable, as it can be quite unnerving to have a group of bikes pass you at high speed as you struggle up a walking trail.