Olympic event #4 – beach volleyball

At around midnight on Friday, LOCOG once again re-released tickets and Peter and I were able to get tickets to the following sessions:

• Beach volleyball (round of 16)
• Women’s beach volleyball (semi-finals)
• Women’s basketball (gold/silver final)

LOCOG does not announce when they re-release the tickets which is aggravating. One man got so frustrated with this that he created a website that would poll the London 2012 website every three minutes and notify his wife when tickets became available. One day after creating the website, he hooked it up to Twitter and it went viral. LOCOG found out about this and put in security measures to block the feed to his website.

Regardless, we were happy to have secured tickets to three more sessions and attended the beach volleyball session yesterday. Unlike the beach volleyball sessions a few days prior, this session only contained two matches.

After collecting our tickets from the ticket box office, we went through security and found ourselves once again at Horse Guards Parade. I was happy.

As we were walking up to our seats, we noticed the warm-up court nestled behind the stadium and we watched the ladies warm-up.

The Women’s match was Switzerland versus the USA team of Jen Kessy and April Ross and the USA won. It wasn’t the best match I’ve seen but I enjoyed sitting in the sunshine, drinking beer and taking it all in. Experiencing the Olympics like this is something very few people have the opportunity to do.

The Men’s match was Italy versus the USA team of Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhausser and Italy won. It was gut-wrenching because Rogers/Dalhausser are the reigning Men’s Olympic beach volleyball champions and more importantly because Phil Dalhausser is a hunk and I am an idiot for not taking close-up photos.

The experience was just as electric and magical as my first day at Horse Guards Parade. Though the session was shorter than the prior two sessions, the upside was that I was far less intoxicated than I was on the all-day beach volleyball extravaganza.