Let the games begin!

Well if I have to go why not make it an adventure! As many know I am attending the 2010 Olympics and am going to have a different perspective. I am not going as a spectator but I am going as a service to the women and men’s hockey as well as the figure skating. My job is to represent Blackstone who is providing the equipment for the service shop’s at all of these venues. We were asked by Easton Hockey to team up with them and provide an incredible experience for all of the athletes who are participating. Basically if they need something in the realm of equipment repair we will provide it. I have participated in Salt Lake 2002, Torino 2006, and now Vancouver 2010. Hopefully you will be able to see the different perspective of down in the bowels of the arena’s where at times there is completely nothing to do and within minutes you are overwhelmed with tasks such as skate sharpening, riveting, boot fitting, equipment repair.....all the way of providing some beverages and a little piece and quite for some coaches. Please feel free to comment on anything or ask questions.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Day 3 - 02/18/2010





Started the day off today at the Men’s game rink, we were fairly busy from the get go Jagr was in getting his skates sharpened he is a great guy and had all of us laughing. He decided to give the FBV a shot and loved it. He had one goal and an assist to lead the team to a victory.
I did an interview with Eurosport which is European sports channel (Canadian TSN) It was an interesting interview as I spoke English and they did no, should make for a great segment. They wanted to know about the new technology and what we were doing to help out the player’s it was actually pretty fun to do the interview and they had fun because we had some pretty high profile players in the room while they were shooting. We have most of Latvia and Belarus on the new cut so the equipment manager’s were down trying to find out what all the player’s were talking about. It was a lot of fun because we had to speak through an interpreter in order to get the point across. They were really impressed and said that the player’s wanted to buy a machine for the team. It’s funny how it works in other countries.
Mike from Team USA made a decision to use our machine to sharpen all of the USA player’s skates, so he was in the room for a while and we really enjoyed his company. It was nice to have him there talking up the FBV he says that half his team is on it which validated it for a lot of the players. I got to see how much respect he has with the players.
It really is exciting to see the athletes and to see the passion they have for their sport. The care that they take in their equipment and the level of intensity they have to learn about new things to improve their game. The days are long but the time is going by very quickly. Talk to you tomorrow, thanks for reading.

3 comments:

sue markham said...

well it sounds like someone had an great day..Good for you steve,and by the way glad you got a picture of sid,i heard he is swamped everywhere he goes,the sistahs are happy...Sue.

Steve Wilson said...

Not Sid. I will work on one for you. When he is down here he is not swamped with people. Sorry for the late day 3 I was swamped and had no internet.

Anthony Thomas said...

It's great to hear more and more elite players are embracing the FBV. I'm curious to know what cut most of them are using with perhaps a few examples like Jagr. 90/75, 90/50?

The behind the scenes blog is interesting. It's great you're taking the time to post. Hopefully you'll get a chance to see some more of the great games live as opposed to mainly on TV.