Travel and game schedule

Travel schedule

The travel arrangements for officials are different to the previous Olympics I have been to.  In previous games we have all flown separately from our home locations directly to the games and met up with fellow officials on arrival.  This time we are all flying into Zurich where the international federation is based.  We will get a chance to meet up with the rest of our team for a dinner and stay the night in Zurich before getting a chartered flight directly to Sochi as a group.

Meeting with Zuzana at Zurich Airport

It can feel quite lonely as a referee travelling to tournaments alone and so the idea of meeting up with the other girls and flying to the Olympics as a team is something I am really looking forward to.  It also helps to build the excitement to share the experience with the other girls, many of whom I have worked numerous tournaments with.

I arrived in Zurich airport about an hour ago – picked up all my many bags and started to walk through the airport to the hotel we are staying at.  I ran into one of the linesman, Zuzana from the Czech Republic.  I’ve known Zuzana for about 5 years and we both worked games together in Vancouver so it was great to see a friendly face on arrival.

Game schedule

Unlike the teams who know which games they will be playing in for the first few days before they arrive, as referees we do not yet know our game schedule. 

On arrival at a tournament the referee supervisors usually hold a meeting with us and distribute the game allocations for the first 2 or 3 days.  Then following the first few days of games they will meet with us again to give us further game allocations.  It is all based on their knowledge and experience of us as officials at previous tournaments and on our performances on the games we are given whilst we are there.  So in effect we are also competing with each other to be assigned to the best games as the ref.

Not knowing what games I will have can be a bit unsettling but it is something I have got used to now.  I just have to be ready to have my first game whenever it is given to me and rest assured as soon as I know what it is I will let people back home know!  In the meantime when I don’t have games I need to get the balance right between staying active and resting to make sure I perform my best for my game.

A supervisor once told me ‘worry about the things you can control and forget about everything else’.  There are a whole lot of factors at an Olympics which are completely outside anyone’s control.  My job is to focus on what I can control - go there and be the best I can be ... that is all I have to focus on and control right now ... everything else will just happen and I will need to deal with it!