Jana Rawlinson in Beijing (© Getty Images)
time World champion Jana Rawlinson travelled to Beijing and checked out the Olympic venues and facilities. She tells IAAF readers all about it.
“I’ve just been on a visit to Beijing for my sponsor, adidas.
“It was my first look at the Olympic city and it’s really taking on the appearance of a host city. There are Olympic flags everywhere and the venues are opening up. At the airport, there’s dozens of Olympic shops. I bought a bracelet to wear to remind me there’s only six months to go.
“Some of the venues are incredible. The Olympic Cube (the aquatic centre) is a stunning stadium. It lights up and glows all the time.
“The main stadium - the Bird’s Nest - is massive. In photographs, the beams look wiry, but they’re actually very thick. When you're close-up it's a very fierce stadium.
“One thing that will be different in August is the weather. It was freezing while we were there, minus 10 degrees C, the coldest I’ve ever been. When we weren’t outside for photo shoots, we were inside keeping warm.
“Because adidas is the Australian Olympic kit sponsor, I got to see and wear the official Australian bodysuit and the track-suit.
“Local people are quite conscious of the Games. There are a lot of foreigners in Beijing all the time, so they didn’t associate you as athletes except when they saw you at a venue. Then they’d ask who you were and what event you were doing.
“The best thing was a clinic we did at a school. I taught a young kid how to do hurdles, Allyson (Felix) took some others for relay changes, Jeremy (Wariner) did warm-ups. The children were buzzing like you’d never seen before, giving us hugs and all trying to speak English.
“They are all very aware of Liu Xiang. They’d ask if he was my friend, did I think he was going to go well. They were quite educated about his event. They’d ask did you think he could beat Dayron Robles. I was thinking ‘wow. That’s like Australians asking if Freeman can beat Perec.’
“I was both a teenager growing up and an athlete aiming to make the team in Sydney 2000. The pre-Games atmosphere in Beijing felt a little bit different to then. Australians are very into all sports and you’re always a little bit biased towards your home country. But Beijing has this chance to showcase itself to the world and it’s taking it. People who have visited before told me there were a lot of old buildings, but it’s a new, spectacular city.
“I’m back running four weeks after my toe operation. There’s no pain, though they told me it might have some ups and downs for a couple of months.
“I haven’t lost any fitness. I could have put off the operation until post-Olympics but I just saw that as something I wasn't prepared to do.
“We were so far ahead of where we thought I was going to be. I just said to Chris, 'let's go ahead and have it now'. Have 4-5 weeks of altered training and then it's going to be gone.”
Jana