The End is Near

Today is the last day of road racing. We have a few chances for medals today. Again, I will be working the feed zone and then assisting athletes at the finish line with drinks and navigating the media line on their way back to our assigned team tent. The morning session of racing is for our hand cyclists and the afternoon will be for the blind and vision impaired. This means a long day for staff under the hot and humid conditions. By the end of the day we were able to celebrate a few more medals. Check www.usparalympics.org for the details. The group put out great efforts today and made the US proud. The USA team had plenty to celebrate by the end. We had produced 14 medals and a world record. We were really proud of these accomplishments by our riders.

We were able to sneak out that evening to the Tianda Chinese Acrobat show. Talk about amazing feats of musculoskeletal moments! Our disabled athletes had been spoiled with accessibility during the games. The theater was not set up for disabled accessibility. We had one wheelchair athlete with us. We ended up lifting him in his chair up and down flights of stairs to get to our seats. We were lucky he was one of our smallest wheelchair athletes. It was quite a sight to have a guy with a prosthetic leg helping lift a guy in a wheelchair up and down stairs.

We then attempted to use the subway for a return to the Olympic Village. Again, we were faced with stairs. We did see a wheelchair lift, but were unable to access it for the first flight. We again lifted our wheelchair athlete down the stairs. Our efforts were discovered by Chinese transit authorities by the time we got down the first flight of stairs. They then proceeded to go above and beyond with helping us navigate. We were escorted through all the lifts and elevators the subway system had. We were able to get back to the Village with minimal barriers at that time.

Later that night our USA Cycling head coach had to make good on a bet he had made with the athletes. He got a USA cut into his hair as payment for the athletes winning at least 5 gold medals.