Opening Ceremonies was amazing! I can’t really describe it in any other way. The whole night for us lasted about 8 hours. We left the village at 5pm and returned a little after 1am. Our first experience of the night was USA staging in the fencing hall. All of the USA athletes attending the march met in here. We were all in one room and it was basically a free for all. The entire men’s basketball team was there, which as you can imagine caused quite the commotion. So, basically for an hour I went around and got pictures of me and as many “stars” as I could. Some of the highlights were meeting LeBron, Kobe, Dwayne Wade, Jason Kidd, and Coach K. After about an hour of feeling completely star struck, we were welcomed to the Olympic Games by George W. Bush! It was extremely cool meeting and shaking the president’s hand. He wished our team good luck and we got a team photo with him. And that was only the beginning.
Here is a picture of all the girls on our team who went to ODU in staging (L to R: Tiff Snow, Angie Loy, Me, Caroline Nichols).
We left the fencing hall and walked about a quarter of a mile to the gymnastics arena for staging for the march.
As you can tell by what we are wearing in our photo, we were extremely hot and uncomfortable for the 1.5 hours we sat in this building waiting for our country to be called to line up and walk to the birds nest. We were country 140! At about 10pm we left the gymnastics arena and began our slow journey to the birds nest. Although it was about a half hour slow walk in a herd of people to the birds nest, it flew by because we were so excited to get to the stadium. We spent the thirty minutes taking pictures of the area and each other.
When we got to the birds nest, and started our march through the tunnel to the entrance of the stadium I got goosebumps as the crowd started chanting USA! USA! USA! Marching around that stadium, seeing all the American flags and taking it all in was something I will never forget. I will also never forget the torch lighting ceremony that took place at the end of the evening. About midnight, the final torch relay took place around the track. The last runner stopped on a red carpet and then was lifting to the top of the stadium on a cable. The torch was about 20 feet above him on the edge of the stadium’s top. He then was flown around the top of the entire stadium on the cable back to where the torch was. It was a spectacular sight. When he lit the torch the crowd went wild. I watched the video of it this morning and I still am in awe of it.
Below are pictures from the opening. From L to R: The birds nest as we were walking to it before the march, me with the newly lit torch in the background, the birds nest as we were leaving, and the view of the packed stadium inside during the march!
Don’t forget, our first game against Argentina is tomorrow night. It will be shown live on MSNBC at with a 6:30am start of the game. I hope you can tune it! Go USA!
I’d like to thank the my cousin and his family for their continued support and encouragement. The Ficthorn family is Tyler, Mindy, Bea and Rylee!
