SOCHI — The downhill races next week will be frightening. The Nordic combined, brutal. But the most grueling Olympic event this year is already finished for many participants: Getting To Sochi.
I stunk at it. With some of the worst travelers already in the clubhouse, I currently stand dead last with a time of 48 hours, 10 minutes, 14 seconds, door to door. More proficient travelers have circumnavigated the entire globe in far less time. I choked, Peyton-ed the whole trip. With the pressure on, I was simply unable to compete with the Norwegian hotshot journalists, or the NBC broadcast crews flying over on charters.
(For the sake of accuracy, I should say I’m actually tied for last, since I was traveling from Newark all along with colleague Nate Vinton. But I’m not sure Nate counts, because he spent most of this odyssey living in an alternate universe, inside his iPhone, where time stands still.)
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My journey began in New York, where it was snowing. That is a redundant phrase these days, but in this case redundancy caused my boarded plane to sit by the jetway for three hours while another plane was stuck behind us.
This led to missed connections late at night in London, which led to an aborted flight from Frankfurt. . . . Look, there’s nothing more boring than other people’s travel stories, so I’ll spare you most of the details. But not all of them, because you’ll definitely want to know about how another reporter walked in on me while I was pooping at the Olympics. I am very good at keeping readers interested.
Let’s first flash back to 3 a.m. on Wednesday, in front of an orange juice machine in the Steigenberger Hotel, not far from the Frankfurt Airport. You know the type of device. Press the button, down comes the juice. Except this time, I put the glass squarely beneath the nozzle, and the juice came out hard at a 45-degree angle, missing everything.
Filip Bondy/New York Daily News
Have everything we need in the hotel room, except a desk chair and a little privacy when pooping.
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That never happens. There are laws of gravity specifically designed to prevent that. But it happened this time, just confirming my belief that nothing works outside New York. And even New York doesn’t work when it’s snowing, which we’ve already stipulated happens all the time.
By this point, I was on the brink anyway. Wayne Coffey, who never beats me to the Olympics, started emailing me about how great the showers were in his Sochi dormitory. Coffey had a different travel itinerary, one not forged in hell, and so he had left a day later and arrived in Sochi more than a day earlier.
One of his emails was sent just as our Aeroflot pilot jammed on the brakes right there on the Frankfurt runway, moments from takeoff. Air traffic controllers had suddenly told the pilot, “Sorry, you missed the 11 o’clock curfew by two minutes.”
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(A side note here: I’m quite sure, if I were allowed to lobby the local Frankurters, they would have granted us a two-minute exception and allowed us to leave just this once.)
In any case, I was stuck in a loop of empty airport . . . airport hotel . . . empty airport. . . . Russia had defeated me, the way it once defeated Hitler. I shouldn’t have attacked in winter.
AP
Unfinished hotels for the media have been a hot topic of discussion in advance of the Sochi Games.
I arrived in Sochi finally, sleepless, at around the 46-hour mark, boarded a bus to my dorm. I told the driver I needed to go to the Omega 11 apartments. He dropped me off instead at Omega 11A. “Where is your voucher?” the receptionist asked. I said I didn’t know what she was talking about.
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“Then you do not belong here,” she declared.
She was haughty, she was scowling, but she was also right. Omega 11A is nowhere near Omega 11, though these developments look exactly the same. One of them should be called Chekhov 9, to avoid the confusion.
Another hour later, I found my little room, noted the time on my watch for posterity. Looking around, there was no chair for the desk. The Internet was down. The room was overheated. The tap water was undrinkable.
I went to the bathroom, seizing a long sought-after opportunity. The outer door opened, and a British journalist entered with identical keys. I greeted him with my pants down. He gracefully backed away, returned to reception and changed rooms. That’s the poop story.
I would love to blame the last 48-plus hours on Vladimir Putin, dump everything in his lap. But really, it’s hard to finger the guy for all this. Seems like only yesterday I was covering the Super Bowl, telling Lupica he should go to Sochi (as if!) and Lupica asking if I was taking a charter there (as if!).
The good news is my journey home should be much better, since I’m connecting on Ukraine Airlines through Kiev. I’m not complaining here, so much as I’m giving up on humankind.
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