No Bolt, no problem

You know, I have always found it somewhat amusing how reporters covering international sporting events, in particular, are met with almost the same fanfare and applause when an athlete from their country wins an important event.

For instance, Lerone Clarke's 100 metres triumph last night brought me several congratulations from some of my peers as well as regular fans around the venue.

For a second, I thought I was the one who had just become 100m Commonwealth Games champion.

Random folks wanted to shake my hand, take a picture, talk.

"Hey Jamaica (which has become my adopted name here) no Bolt, no problem, huh?" was the first thing that I heard after Clarke's 10.12 seconds run gave the country its first medal at these Games.

Questions

Then came the long discussions that tend to follow these conversations. "So who is this fellow? Is he considered good back home?" "Jamaica, why are your guys so fast?" "Jamaica, tell me about Lerone. Do you think he'll get better than Bolt?"

While I always try to be as accommodating as possible, time is never always on my side and so a good old two-word response and a change in position normally comes into play, and with good effect. You see, it's all about strategy.

"Well, yes." "Yam." "Who knows?" And that takes care of that.

Anyway, big respect to Lerone, Dorian and all the others who have made the effort to represent their country at these Games, even amid trying circumstances.

On another note, I have now spent five nights and four days in Delhi ... let's see, that's close to 100 hours, or 6,000 minutes, or 360,000 seconds. If anything, there doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day; time spent hopping from venue to venue, and cursing everything from the poor information network at the media centre to the extremely unreliable transportation system really takes a lot more time than one realises.

My schedule for the past few days has been very taxing, to say the least, and continues in the same order like clockwork, starting with my daily 7 a.m. wake-up call from the front desk and ending with three hours or so of sleep after returning 'home' at 3:30 a.m. or4 a.m., almost 24 hours later. It's amazing that I haven't been sleep-walking yet, but ... .

Nonetheless, I have become experienced to these demands and this, like the previous ones, is an opportunity that I relish. Who knows, maybe my goodly employers will offer me an extended vacation when I return (clears throat).