Intro

Wow, I didn't imagine that writing about my experience at Torino 2005 would be so difficult... I don't even know where to start. It is sure that this will be a report different from any other I have ever written, because this experience was unlike any previous one... I was not a spectator, I was not a journalist, I was not a volunteer... I worked in the core office of the organization! Let me start from the beginning, which is quite far from the actual championships... back in the summer I had started talking with the lady who would become my boss about the possibility of me moving to Torino ... so just two days after ending my temp contract in Toshiba (air conditioners), I found myself in Torino doing a job interview for a spot as assistant competition manager at Toroc - Torino2006 organizing committee. I already knew my way around there, since I had been writing figure skating articles for their website with a friend of mine for a while. It was quite a big decision for me: it meant leaving home, going to live in torino, finding a home all by myself, and also surviving with the barely acceptable salary paying the rent and everything else... it also meant leaving my skating, my teather group, etc etc etc. I needed time to think, but my "boss" kept pressing me to give them an answer... which ended up being yes! It was a hard period, because in the same few days I was writing a good portion of the texts for the offical program of Euros, another "on-the-side" job that I had gotten through my new boss. Not a difficult task - I can speak of figure skating for hours! - but I had very little time to do it all, so I spent days and night writing.. so I had very little time to organize myself, look for a place to live.... So on december 6th, 2004, I jumped on a train heading for Torino.

Part 1: settling (almost) down, and getting ready for the championship

The first couple of weeks were a nightmare, because I had to settle in, try to learn as much as possible of my new workplace, understand my job, and also find a place to live (for the first two weeks I slept on a couch in my boss' living room, but it was clearly a temporary solution). House hunting in Torino proved to be a complete and utter nightmare (when you're in the office from 8.15 to 19.30 it's not easy to go house hunting!). I have seen places that I wouldn't have left my dog sleep in, and offered for very high rates. I discarded the idea to share a house with someone, because I really need my spaces, and with all this stress and the impossible rhytms I was facing, I really didn't want to have to adjust to having someone around as well. I am also a quite private person, with a very strong sense of my "territory", so I have a hard time imagining someone I know almost nothing of getting near my things... At the end of the first week I was exhausted and with the lowest morale ever.... I kept being told that people had had to look for weeks, if not months, before finding a home... I was really questioning my decision. Thankfully the next week I found a place I liked... it was absurdly expensive and very small, but also nice.. so I had my mum come and have a look at it (because I was so desperate I had lost my rational side) and we signed the contract. By next sunday night, I was "at home". We didn't have much free time: Christmas was almost there, and though none of us was going to have many holidays (we even had both Xmas and New Year on some weekend!), lots of offices were going to be close. To add to my discomfort, I also have to say that after working from 8am to 8pm, I came home at night to end writing and translating the articles for the Official Program... I grew more and more tired every day! I know I should have tried to find some free time, but I had my good reason: with the money I earned with this job, I managed to pay for the laptop I had purchased to do this job ((I couldn't bring my home pc to Torino leaving my mum without it, but I needed one badly.. so I took the plunge a bought my first laptop!). Contacting the volunteers from the list, trying to create their schedules, answering their problems and requests.. it was no easy task! I felt a little cut out from the other activities, but I had so much to do that I didn't have time to complain. I had already finished a first draft of the shifts when Bev arrived, and took charge of checking them all, coordinating the exact hours with me... Apart from this job, and my writing, I also had ended up following the final assembly part of the official program, and in particular I devoted a lot of time to finding and selecting the pictures to appear on the various pages, calling friends, skaters and photographers... I had almost succeeded in getting my friends Fede and Massi on the cover with a beautiful photograph from their Libertango FD, but my boss totally vetoed my idea because she wanted Carolina on the cover. As if she wasn't on already enough posters everywhere. :( But in the end I didn't even care that much... most things on that program (starting from the graphics and the cover colours) had been decided way before my arrival in Torino, and I didn't like them, but they couldn't be changed. SO I think my job was mostly of "damage limitation" and not really the making of a nice Official Program.

Part 2: January comes

Most of my memories of that period are a big blur.. a lot of work, very little time to do anything.. laundry, other household chores... aaargh. In December I managed to come home at the weekends and for Xmas and New Year's, but in January we were in the office 29 day on 31 (we stayed at home on January 1st and 6th)... I had a recurrent problem of never being able to find an open supermarket because I left the office too late, and not having a car with me I couldn't drive to a mall where I would find one still open... I tried to eat well at lunch (the canteen was very good, and the Tuscan self-service restaurant as well, and then for dinner I survived on bread, cheese and yoghurt I could buy at a discount shop that was right outside the office, and closed quite late - but which didn't carry fruit, vegetables, meat or anything fresh. A couple of times my mum even came from Milano to stay with me for the weekend, to help me out a little. Not that I actually saw much of her, since I spent the weekends in the office, while se tidied up my home... I really felt bad about this, as she did the trip to help me and I couldn't even give her a bit of my time.... I calculated that in January I worked 29 days of 31... on Jan. 1st it's a national holiday, (another national holiday we have is Jan 6th, actually most of Italy is on holiday for the whole week between these dates, and we spent that in the office) and on Jan 9 my boss gave us all a day off to get ready for the championships... stock up a little the fridge, wash as many clothes as possible, etc. I remember being home alone on Jan 9th, with the laundry going on in the other room, me on the very uncomfortable couch I had, watching some bad tv while trying to reach my friends who were at the Italian national championship in Merano, trying to figure out who the new champions were to send the right bios off for the Official Program (I had originally meant to have on the book the bios of the athletes that were actually going to skate at Euros, but after Karel winning the title and Bacchini being sent anyway, I decided to publish the actual champions, so Karel instead of Bacchini. Easier job with Fede/Massi and Alessia/Andrea, and with Carolina and Valentina.. no doubts there), feeling very left out and sad. I missed my friends, my life and everything.

I had a better day on January 12th, when there was the Ceremony for the delivery of the Palavela to the Torino2005 organization/Torino Ice 2005. I had brought my camera with me in hope to take some pictures of Babi and Mauri for their website, as they were performing in the ceremony after a short-track exhibition. Somehow, I ended up taking photos of the event for Toroc, so I was free to hang around instenad of being forced to sit in a corner of the tribunes. (for Babi and Mauri's photos, see here their official website, www.fusarpolimargaglio.com ). My friend Lydia from torino had been invited by Babi, and so I was barely starting to chat with her and Diego (Babi's husband) that Ingrid (the other sport competition assistant) dragged me to have lunch at the canteen... I was not happy, as I had been looking forward to spend a few minutes with my friends.. I already had no social life whatsoever, now I couldn't even speak to my friends for a few minutes.. I didn't even manage to say hello to Babi and Mauri, I just left some e-mail print outs from the site to Lydia, to be delivered to Babi...
From January 17th we were supposed to start working from our offices at the Palavela, but my boss insisted we went there on the 16th to start laying down our offices. I was quite mad at this idea, because it was also the last day of the Short Track Euros, and it was really not a nice thing to force the Short track team to pack their things right as soon as the competition closed - they still had their closing banquet to attend! I was even more mad at her because my mum had come to Torino to bring me some more clothes, and I had to leave her all alone again (without what I thought was a good reason); at some point I found myself on a taxi towards the mall with a colleague to kill some time befor the scheduled meeting at the Palavela, and I decided to leave my colleague alone and got the taxi driver to drop me near my home (which was on the way) and sat for a cup of tea with my mother. To make a long story short, we more or less managed to set up the office in palavela, at least in the main things (mistery remains as why my colleague wanted to impose her ideas on everyone, as she was not really planning to spend much time in there...).

the office	my mascotte	from the door

We managed to get back home not too late. The worst was yet to come.

Part 3: getting ready, and start of practices/ the volunteers training day

We had a few days of almost "solitude" as the official practices were going to start only on the 23rd, and our other fixed appointment was the volunteer training day on the 21st. Not that everything started on the 21st... before that day, there was the whole structure to set up again, changing over from the short track championships (which started from the ice, which had to be scraped off for a good part, to erase the short track oval, repainted white and the new top layers made again to the exact figure skating quality specifications, to end with tiniest details like setting up judges' meeting rooms, music rooms, etc). We started having someone skate in the building a few days earlier than the official first day of practices anyway, with Fede and Massi coming to Torino before everyone else to practice with their coach Roberto Pelizzola (our music coordinator). They were the first to set a figure skating blade on the ice of Torino 2005! It was fun to pass them in the corridors, with no one else around... I also kept providing them with taxi vouchers to get to and from the hotel, because the official transportation hadn't been activated yet. On Jan 20th I had the first shifts of some volunteers scheduled, because it was the first day of arrivals at the official hotels. Actually there was really little to do, as few skaters were supposed to arrive so early, but if it was announced that they could show up from that day, we had to have someone ready to welcome them! In fact some volunteers even missed the training day because they were already working. I have to say a biiiiiiig thank you to all my friends, who had joined en masse the volunteers' group, and proved to be totally precious, during the whole championships, doing double and triple shifts to cover for any missing volunteer. They were also great moral support, when they stopped by at my office just to see how I was doing, to keep my moral a little higher after days of not sleeping and working 18/20hours... You know guys, I really appreciated that!

It was a great emotion for me to finally meet on the 21st all the other volunteers, with whom I had just had phone and e-mail conversations... It was a day of great stress and thrill, but a very good one! We arrived at Palavela early as usual, discovering that a very strong wind was blowing, pulling down all the nets and barriers shielding us from the area where works were still in process... amids all this devastation we waited for "our volunteers" to arrive, guiding them in small groups up to the press conference room for the lectures and explainations given by all the function's chiefs..

a short tour of the Palavela, and then we were off to the Palaghiaccio.. easier said than done! We divided into how many cars we could take, using those assigned to our function (a Punto, a Stilo and an Ulysse, all by fiat, of course) plus those of the team leaders and anyone else who could offer a ride to some volunteer. I was given the keys to the Ulysse - a car I had never touched before in my life - and I immediately had my embarassing moment: I sat down, got all the volunteers I could have on the car, ready to start.... but I couldn't find where the hand brake was!! The car wouldn't move without unlocking it, but it was nowhere to be located! I had to turn to the volunteers and ask :"sorry guys, I've never climbed in this car before, does anyone know anything about it? Does anyone know where the hand brake is??" - I was sooooo embarassed - but no one of my volunteers had a clue as well... fortunately Ingrid (who had already taken this car) was passing by and I jumped out of the car calling for her "Iiiiiiiiiiingrid! Tell me where the hand brake is!" (answer: half hidden on the left of the driver's seat, almost against the door). Following Aldo De Trovato's car I arrived at the Tazzoli rink, managed a perfect parking in one single manoeuvre and visited the rink for the first time.. uuuhhrgh.... it looked quite too much a "work in progress", but if that was fine for the ISU..... After a short visit, we all had lunch together and it was my turn to be bombarded by questions, request for shift changes, etc... panic!!! Somehow I managed to note everything down, and with the coordinators to whom I delegated some internal shift changes, I managed to fix the first few days. I almost couldn't believe.. one more day and the championships would begin!

GO TO PAGE 2: THE CHAMPIONSHIPS BEGIN