Olympic Dreams

Today I came as close as I ever will to competing in the Olympics by swimming laps at the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Center (the pool used for the 2000 Summer Olympic Games). I decided to skip the morning sessions of the conference and I made my way to Olympic park via the train system. Since Sydney was a well developed city when preparations began for the 2000 Olympic Games, the Olympic Park is actually pretty far away from Sydney. It took an hour to get there by train.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I got there. I had a weird feeling that it would be kind empty and awkward - like I had shown up 10 years too late to the party. Surprisingly, there were actually a lot of people walking around. From what I can tell, some of the buildings have been sold to businesses, so there are still a decent number of people walking around and taking the train, etc. I could also see that there were other tourists (cameras are usually the dead give-away).

Even though the Olympics there were 10 years ago, it felt cool to just walk around the Olympic Park. This was the first time that I had been able to do something like this (having never been to that part of Atlanta before - or any other site). It was fun to walk around with the John Williams composition 'Summon the Heroes' echoing through my head. The park has a quite feel to it now, but you can still tell that it was designed to welcome the world to Australia. Next, I made my way to the aquatic center.

My former teammates and friends who used to swim competitively often comment about how it is so hard to just go to a pool and enjoy yourself after you swim competitively. There is always this feeling that pools were put there so that you could swim up and down them for hours on end - haha. In any case, this was the perfect opportunity for just such a person. Walking through the doors, I was greeted by the familiar smell of chlorine and I paid the small fee to enter the facility which now hosts competitive events and is open to the public for recreation and lap swimming. My first impression of the competition pool was that it looked a lot darker than it did on TV. Then I noticed that they only had about a quarter of the lights turned on - I guess that makes sense. The grandstands were huge, though the whole facility reminded me of the aquatic center at La Salle University. The host of the YMCA Eastern PA District swim meet, I had competed at La Salle a few times over the years and the setup of bleachers on either side of the pool with a diving well at the end was very familiar. However, everything here was a bit more up to date and the pool was necessarily a little more than 2 times longer than the 25 yard pool at La Salle.

The pool in Sydney, when it was built, was to be the fastest pool ever constructed thanks to the specific depth of the pool and spillover gutters in the walls. You can easily see how the spillover system works - the walls have slots that allow the waves to enter the spillover zone (which is below the deck of the pool). So, in effect, the pool is a bit larger than what you see from the outside. Just walking around the pool gave me chills as I thought about the great swimmers such as Ian Thorpe who competed at those games (this was, of course, before the 'Michael Phelps era').

I jumped in the refreshingly chilly water and swam laps until I my arms just couldn't do it any more. It's amazing how much swimming highlights the fact that people very rarely use those motions in everyday situations. I also had forgotten how long a long-course (50m) pool was. I think the last time I swam in a long-course pool was the summer of 2002 when I competed for the Hampden Aquatic Club in Camp Hill (or Maybe it's technically Mechanicsburg - I don't really know). Anyhow, we would practice in the 50m outdoor pool every morning.

I had a lot of fun and it was a great experience for the imaginative mind. It's fun to jump back now and then to the more child-like mentality where you can do anything you want to do in your own mind. Just pretending to be swimming in the Olympics in a pool that actually was used for the games was great (even though the only people I was beating were the old folks and the floater-folks in the slow lanes). At the end of the day, I really don't miss all of the practicing and long, hard, solitary hours associated with competitive swimming, but the experience today brought back a lot of good memories from that part of my life. Over the 10 or 11 years that I actively competed as a swimmer, I gathered a lot of great memories of fun and exciting times and I also was privileged to be coached by, and to compete with and against several outstanding people - too numerous to list here. The morning of lap swimming left me physically exhausted, but very content. With that, I decided that it was time to move on and see a bit more of the Olympic Park.

I had lunch outside the Olympic Stadium. It is unfortunate that the public cannot access more of the facilities at the Olympic Park. It was great that I got to actually see and use the pool, but the same option doesn't exist for using the track or some of the other facilities and I think it is too bad (though I understand that this could be not the most practical of things). I made my way down to the current resting place of the Olympic Cauldron. After the games, they removed it from the stadium and re-configured it as a water feature in a park located adjacent to the stadium. Personally, I'm not sure I really like the looks of the end result. Something was written in Greek around the base of the cauldron, but there didn't seem to be an English or French translation.

With that, I walked around a bit more and then made my way back to the train station. I almost fell asleep on the train home but finally, I made it back to Darling Harbour. I participated in some of the afternoon conference activities and then got ready for the conference dinner.

Prior to this conference dinner, my standard for comparison had always been the ICOM 2008 conference that we organized in Honolulu. While I still think we had much better food at ICOM, this conference definitely had a bit more style than the conference in Hawaii. As we entered the room, intelligent lighting fixtures were illuminating the tables with all sorts of colors and fog filled the air. The tables were very nicely prepared with all the flatware and glassware that you could imagine. The room had a great new-age technological feel to it though the lighting and colors made it difficult to see what your food actually was...

I sat next to Cara at the dinner and we had a good time talking throughout the meal. Matt and Aurelia (from CSIRO) were also at our table, but they were on the other side. I didn't really know the others at the table and though we talked briefly, I mostly talked with Cara. The keynote speaker for the dinner (I forget the name and apparently they didn't print it in the conference booklet because I can't find it anywhere) had a slightly pessimistic tone that, I think, was trying to be overshadowed by an optimistic tone, but I found that I wasn't sure how I was 'supposed' to feel afterward. The speak (I believe) worked for Eastman Kodak and started by talking about the nanotechnology that makes film photography possible (of course this wasn't known when it was developed). He then talked about how an SLR film camera has the equivalent resolution of something like 500 mega-pixels. Of course, that has now been made 'obsolete' in the minds of some by digital photography. The rest of his talk seemed to center on how much data mankind produces and I think his point was that we need to design new ways to store that data or we simply won't have the resources to do so. However he tried to make these points while using several 'edgy' global warming and political comments that left me feeling all over the place. He was definitely a good speaker, but I think the speech needed more of a focus and I think there were parts that were absolutely perfect for this audience, but others that could have been omitted with no loss in effectiveness. Oh well, that's just my opinion.

After dinner, they had a cover band and people got up to dance. The band wasn't very good at all (still, the best cover band I have ever heard was the band that played at Justin and Sloane's wedding reception). However, it was a neat idea. People in our CSIRO group were being a bit shy about dancing, so I said that I would get up and dance as soon as I saw Tim Bastow out on the dance floor. I didn't actually think Tim (who isn't exactly young - or the dancing type) would actually do it. But he did and that ended up getting the whole group on the dance floor for some musically painful covers of ABBA and Michael Jackson songs. It ended up being a really fun night.

After the dinner/dance, I went to have a beer with Dario and Aaron and we had a good time talking along the harbor. It was nice to talk about things that weren't related to work. After that, I came back to the hotel and I am ready to get some much-needed sleep!