Just under a week until the Olympic Games

It's now less than one week until the Olympic games. One week until we are in London. The remaining Ball State University students arrive tomorrow and our first group meeting will take place on Wednesday.

Just a few short weeks ago when my course leader approached us in class about this opportunity, we were all sceptical about whether the project would actually go ahead. Us? Second years, going to the Olympics? It was all very surreal. But sure enough the bursaries we had applied for had arrived, this was it, the American's had arrived and we leave for London on Thursday - not really knowing what to expect.

With such a short time to prepare we had clambered around looking for leads, contacts and interviews. Press passes were out of the equation, after ringing the Olympic press office I found out deadlines for potential applicants ended last year! 

We had however been in contact with Sally Jones the university's press officer, BBC Hereford and Worcester, Worcester News, Craig Williams - who provided us with contacts for the Olympics and Paralympics (one being David Mycock - a lecturer of sports science at the University, who was actually coaching the Blind Football team!) and various other media outlets. The picture in the top right of this post was taken in our first meeting, we was used it in our press release. To get some exposure for our project we each sent off a copy to our local newspapers as we are all from different towns and cities.

http://www.worcester.ac.uk/discover/worcester-journalism-students-in-olympic-project.html

I was luckily to already have an interview up my sleeve weeks before we left. After co-incidentally being sat right next to the family of an Olympic athlete's parents whilst watching an pre-Olympic warm up game between Team USA and Team GB Men's basketball team. My friends and I signalled to each other and mouthed "is that his parents?" as they clapped and cheered enthusiastically after 22 year old Andrew Lawrence nailed a three pointer. I lent over and asked the petite blonde lady whether they were in fact his parents and sure enough they were!
They were both very friendly and after the game I approached his father, Renaldo, who I later found out was a  former NBA player drafted in 1979. After introducing myself I told him about our project, who I would be working for during the Olympics and that I was interested in interviewing his son.
"Make sure you email me" he instructed as I wrote down his email address on a bit of torn of cardboard originally from a hot dog box. Obviously I was incredibly chuft as well as lucky to have stumbled across an interview like that one! You can find the full interview later on in this blog.