I had an extraordinary summer.
Two years ago I was interviewed for a job as a driver for Canada’s CBC media team for the Tokyo Olympics.
Then when corona hit the job went out the window. A lot of debate about whether the Olympics would go ahead or not ensued. Personally, I was hoping they’d postpone the Olympics for four years and just skip it altogether.
But also I was keen to work the job. One the money, two what a great opportunity to do something related to the Olympics.

This post could go very long, so I’m going to break it up into a diary like record to follow (for my own personal records) but a quick summary to start with here.

The job was a 25 day contract, no days off, 10 hour shift payment per day. Overtime if you went over ten and if you were sent home early you’d still get paid for ten hours.

I started on July 16th and could have started prior to that if I was able to get off my main job (but couldn’t).
The first day was to go direct to Nippon Rent-A-Car and pick up the car I would be using.
The first week or so was to help media technicians get to venues to set up the cameras and media sets etc and get them lunches if requested. This involved going to the Olympic stadium, Gymnastics hall and the Aquatic Center. When not doing that I was showing drivers around who started after me and familiarizing ourselves with routes to all the different venues and finding the often hard to find P5 parking locations we had to park in.

My main job when the Olympics actually started was to work with the Athlete Co-ord team. This meant I’d be driving the athletes from the Olympic village to the media center for their interviews.

Yes, going to get long…. will do one post for each day I was there…. more to come…