[1]I've been out here at Stanford for two days now and here are my impressions so far... I arrived on Thursday afternoon and went right to the pool. Registration was a breeze - only took me about 10 minutes to get through as a Seal Sponsor, although the line for non-sponsors was very short and would only have added about 5 minutes to the process. I realize now that I didn't pick up my tickets to the social events I signed up for at the end of registration because it wasn't clear what you had to do and no one was directing you through. I went back yesterday to pick up the tickets and they said the special events desk wouldn't be open until 1 PM. What??? Why isn't this desk manned all day? It's a pain to walk all the way to the back corner of the complex several times to find out that it's still not open. I got in and warmed up in the Belardi pool on Thursday afternoon also. The pool felt fine, but I was really stiff from all the travel and only did 1400 meters because it was just worse the more I swam.
I stayed around for the opening ceremonies on Thursday night. I wanted to escape and sleep since I had gotten up at 4 AM eastern time for my flight that morning, but decided to stay around anyway. I'm glad I did. It was a nice experience to be in the stands with so many swimmers from all over the world, and the opening ceremonies were pretty good. We got a "wave" started from our section of the stands and going around the stadium many times. One incident we noticed happened after they paraded out 73 flags and announced each of the participating countries when their flag came out. A woman went up to the people sitting by the podium and was really laying into them about something. Later in the speaches they mentioned the 74 teams participating. It appears that they left Russia out of the parade of flags. Oops.
I spent Friday morning timing for the 800 free. I signed up as a volunteer before coming out to the meet for the days that I'm not swimming. The meet ran smooth for this distance day overall, with very little disruption in the flow of the meet. I have to admit however that it seemed kind of cheesy that out here in the Bay Area with about 13 thousand kids teams around and the kids out of school for the summer that the World Championships would be begging for volunteer timers over the PA system. Why didn't they contract local kids teams to serve as timers in advance like every national championship does? We also had just one timer per lane. What would happen if the touch pad failed on a lane where someone turned in a world record time? I don't believe that one hand time backup is sufficient documentation for a world record.
Being a FINA-run international meet, things run a little differently than our usual USMS meets. Swimmers have to go to a marshalling tent up to 5 heats before their heat to check in (less for distance events). That ran smooth, with just a few swimmers showing up near the starting blocks that we had to direct over to the tents. A big difference was in the counting. You couldn't use your own lap counters. There were FINA officials manning the lap counters (two lanes per official). They would not dip the lap counters in the pool for the swimmers and you didn't even get a choice what side of the lane the counter was displayed on. They also counted downward rather than upward. This could have been a tough adjustment for some swimmers.
Neil swam the 800 and finished 5th in a 9:15.32. Good swim! I'm sure he is happy with that time. I saw him coming into the pool complex as I was leaving. I needed some rest and couldn't stay around to watch his swim.
Jack arrived in the afternoon after I got back to the hotel. We're both in the 100 breast tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.