Matt is FortiusOne’s Director of Operations and employee number one spun out of George Mason. In addition to keeping all the gears working at FortiusOne, he moonlights as a national team rowing coach. He’s worked his way up the ranks and realized his goal this summer of being selected as a coach for the Beijing Olympics for the womens quad. They won a silver at the Lucerne World Cup so keep an eye on them over the coming weeks. Matt has been sending emails on his experience in China and I thought it would be fun to give folks a first hand account of the Olympics from the inside.

Matt’s China Report

The course is beautiful especially when the air clears to see the starting line 2000 meters away and the mountains in the background. The boathouse is a modern structure with a dozen boat bays, upstairs air conditioned athletes rooms for stretching and resting, lounges and offices. The colors on the course are vibrant. Bright blues, greens, oranges and reds decorate all of the banners, grandstands, towers, tents and military barracks next to the course. Bike paths go around the full course and the coaches spend much time there, catching up with familiar faces from around the globe as well as taking video of practice, times and evaluating your crew and competition.

However, while trying to watch your team practice one needs be wary of the speeding cars that whiz by delivering apparently important people where they need to be. The venue is also home to a spectacular man-made whitewater river surrounded by grandstands. Whitewater canoes/kayaks used to be run on natural courses in the mountains, now they are built with huge turbines and elevators that carry the boats with the athletes in them for practice. If you get a chance to see this on TV you should check it out.

Today was by far the cleanest day and air quality that we have seen since we arrived. The countryside is awesome when you can see the mountains and have significant visibility. When we landed on Sunday, you literally could not see the end of the terminal or planes on the tarmac. I got to go to the Olympic Village downtown and was surprised to barely makeout the Bird’s Nest stadium and Water Cube pool, and I wasn’t more than a ½ mile away.

Our first day on the course was about the same and we could barely see beyond the grandstands which extend for nearly 500 meters of the 2000 meter course. They have added contingencies to the significant steps of closing down factories and cutting traffic in half through the even/odd last number on your driver’s license plate in order to cut down should the weather conditions make it necessary to reduce air pollution. At any rate, we hope it stays as beautiful as it is now.

Our hotel is an extremely nice five star about 1.5 miles from the course, nothing around but a beer factory, another hotel and agricultural fields. There is marble everywhere, much friendly help and importantly good food. As I mentioned before “certified food” was a big concern, but everyone is quite pleased with the diet. A significant amount of fresh fruit and fresh vegetables adorn every meal. Entrees include lamb chops, beef, chicken, pork, eggs, stir fries, rice, fried rice, spaghetti and a soup/hot cereal. Notably missing are desserts and cheese, which are hardly served and have people trying to get a cookie or chocolate fix from their personal stash. The bean curd dessert is okay, but is no ice cream brownie sundae.

Not only is there plenty of help at the hotel, but there are many people always around us. Security is tight and we literally go through security 11 times a day including 5 trips through metal detectors manned by hotel staff, military and Olympic volunteers. We bike to and from the course and there are many workers picking up bits of garbage with chopsticks, sweeping the road with bamboo brooms, watching the bridge, hosing down the freshly planted grass and flowers, guarding each property along the way, etc. Everyone has a job no matter how small. We are in an agricultural zone and I did a double take when I saw 15 people working in a field with a horse pulling a plow to till the soil. I’ve got to try and get a picture of it, because it is old school.

On the same note, no one makes a decision without multiple consults. At the airport, accreditation, security, the course and the hotel, we have asked a question and the person asked, immediately asks someone else, who then asks someone else and then a phone call is made and an answer brought back by as many as 9 people. Answers by committee for the good of all. It takes a while, but at the end of the day we are well served and have everything we need.

Rowers stand out in the real world and certainly here, we do not look like the locals, who look politely and with a certain curiosity at us. I always smile wave and and say hello in Chinese and it gets a huge reception. Just knowing about 3 words in Chinese and smiling to the same people you see everyday, whether it be the street sweepers or the venue management, shows an effort and garners a warm reception and big smiles in return.

Man hours put in to beautify Beijing are visible. From the airport to the Village and on our road are freshly planted and manicured horticultural displays that go for the full 25 miles to the center of the city. Additionally banners hang on lampposts that run the full length of the same roads at about 200 foot intervals. Certainly demonstrates why China is the leading textile producer in the world. The three major roads that we have been on have the same colorful banners displayed at the course that go forever. Immediately outside of the venue is a stretch of about a ½ mile with various flowers in pots and displayed in groups lined up. I decided on my run to give a shot at estimating the number of flowers and have come up with a reasonable guess at 100,000 little flower pots. I didn’t count the banners, but together the effect certainly beautifies the city. The flowers have been specially crossbred to withstand the heat and they have 4 million additional plants housed somewhere to replace these should something happen.

One of the highlights thus far has been going to the Great Wall. It is impressive. We drove the 45 minutes from the hotel to a gondola, which took us to the wall. The wall is built on many high ridges that go for miles and was meant to defend invaders from the north on horseback. Building on these ridges looks like an impossible task with steep canyons that appeared to provide adequate fortification. The wall itself is well maintained in the section we were at, but you could see a couple of ridges over there was an unrestored section that required attention.

As a tourist attraction, there are many vendors, including Tshirt sales, Coca Cola sales, Mao’s Red Book sales, silk pajamas, fans, magnets, chess sets, etc., all apparently for a dollar(until you stopped) from the estimated hundred of vendors on the path. Be prepared to negotiate. Also a live and very old camel which for about $1.50 you could sit on and take a picture was found at the base of the gondola.

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