Chicago media summit
CHICAGO, IL
Right from Australia to Chicago for a media summit. It is like a big gathering of select hopefuls from all sports to get the bulk of the media promos and questions out of the way, primarily NBC, but others too. 450 journalists in all, they said...
This was my first time actually leaving Chicago O'Hare Airport, so I spent part of the day exploring downtown by foot trying to cure jetlag and sickness. Went to the Museum of Contemporary art, Millennium Park, peeped some shops, bookstores, art galleries, a cafe, saw the lake, river, some Gremlin Nikes, Trump building, lobby of the Drake hotel, cool architecture and tons of sculptures. Real nice city, even a bit of sunshine. Chicago is bidding for the 2016 summer games.
The media summit was a full day's work, answering questions about the sport over and over, telling our stories, explaining about BMX's debut at the olympics, what it is, yada yada. I definatly know better than to use our language in explaining things to normal media, we come across very rough if details are left to interpretation. Don't think I will get bleeped out this time, but I was pretty tired, so who knows, kind of a blur:)..... Donny, Kyle bennett, Mikey, Kim, and I were the BMX reps in attendance. Donny was honored to get to throw the opening pitch at the Cubs game- pretty big time, he loves this stuff:) I can take it or leave it, educating people and opening the world's eyes to cycling is a worthy cause.
So....Woke up 7 am, ate breakfast, 8am briefing, press conference 8:30, break down into individual sessions, then into NBC promo green screen rooms, then todayshow.com mini interviews, questionaires, nbc moving headshots (like they do with football players when the have their names and stats or whatever), also like x-games. Then a bunch of other stuff I can't remember, lunch, then into broadcast sessions in 10 different rooms individually 10-15 min each, and to finish it off a massive photo studio shoot, ten booth rotations with us and track and field but all individual for newspappers, associated press type stuff, getty images, washington post, usa today, etc. Just stock photos and headshots anyone can use I guess for local papers or magazines, I don't really know. Cool to see some of the people we met in NYC, Rebecca from SI and Alyssa from ESPN, among others, and also Curtis form Nike, There are some fun people in the biz, so it wasn't all bad, made friends. Thanks to Andy Lee and Andrea at USAC for helpin out too.
Such a blow out of a day though, I have no idea what time I am in. I was supposed to get home at 1130 pm , then fly to sea otter at 6 am but didn't quite make that wake up call.
I spent my day replacing a lost passport and sitting in La traffic. No rest for the wicked or sick, gonna need a whole week passed out to recover I think.