The first day of the event proper kicked off early this morning, with the team having breakfast together in the Surrey Rifle Club at 0730. Not quite bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but we perked up a bit after breakfast. At that point, the shooters and Marina headed back to their rooms to prepare their kitbags and transport them to the Lord Roberts Centre, and myself and Geoff headed for the LRC to check up on squadding times and the like as they’d not been finalised the night before. In the end, they wouldn’t be finalised until later that day, but it did give us the chance to find where equipment control was located and when the kit arrived, to get first place in line for equipment control. We’d also been fortunate enough to get picked to help with the air rifle range testing early that morning, so we wanted to make sure our shooters got through the control checks quickly. Turns out that, as is the case with all matches, an extra pair of hands was rather useful and so once we’d helped the other judges get equipment control ready, our shooters got through in jig time and headed off to their training.
Unfortunately for me, demonstrating ability is the fastest way to get assigned work.
Yeah, doesn’t look too streneous. Till you see the queue…
About 113 shooters later, I finally managed to catch up to Marina and Geoff and Matt to find that the shooting our team had been doing had gone very well and that official training was all well in hand. I left them to get on with what they do best and went off to sort out a few more paperwork glitches. I’ve come to believe this is the only way you can even hope to stay afloat at this game – let coaches coach and let the team manager handle all the little crap that pops up to bite you like meal tickets and booking gym time and keeping in touch with the organisers in case stuff changes and ensuring that everyone on the team gets told what of anything they need to know about. It’s a job made up of many small tasks and one goal – to ensure that the shooters have a smooth run of it.
And they didn’t have too rough a patch today. Official training went very well and they’re all ready for an early start tomorrow (the junior men start at 0830 so that’s them on the range by 0730 and in breakfast at 0700). However, the day’s shooting is over for us by noon, so everyone will have a chance to take a break easily enough. And we’ve had the first of our team evening briefings on the contents of today’s technical meeting and our iteniaries as they stand right now.
And now it’s nearly one in the morning and I’ve to be up for 0630. Gah! Some random shots before I hit the hay:
Matt and Elizabeth during training in the morning.
Paula’s official training.
Matt and Geoff watching official training for our team.
3P Air Rifle tables set up in the LRC
Technical meeting.