Lofalitsidwa: 03.02.2018
The hotel lobby and dining room are filling up more and more. New people arrive in the apartments every day. Our bus driver has already picked up the first German words and greets us with "Guta Morga". The welcome at the chairlift was less friendly. A Korean woman actually denied us access. We had the wrong color on our accreditation and our cover was not enough for the passage. Of course, we started to protest. We can't be stopped from going through, can we? She then called her boss. She also strongly rejected us. Are we really supposed to walk up to the slalom start now? Rico had one last idea and radioed Tina from OBS. When she arrived after a few minutes, the Korean women let us pass.
Today we were allowed to transport camera and camera accessory boxes from the slalom start hub to the podiums. Since the slope was closed, we had to carry everything down the steep and narrow slope behind the A-nets. Especially with the heavy boxes, we had to make sure not to slip and fall. Hansruedi, Peter and I mastered this brilliantly. Afterwards, we were allowed to lift the heavy boxes onto the podiums.
In the afternoon, we were assigned the task of securing the already mounted TV cameras better. Most of the time, they were only attached to a single screw on a thin plywood panel. Armed with tension straps, we climbed up the adventurous podiums. There were ladders, but they were hardly accessible or led to nothing. So we had to climb up on the outside, position and tighten the tension straps, and climb down again. We also mastered this brilliantly, so that we more than earned our tea break in the TV tent.
An additional note almost went unnoticed: We got to experience Michaela Schiffrin up close. She passed us and rushed to the chair, where she was supervised by 2 coaches and analyzed her last run on a tablet.