Flashes of Panic

In Osaka, there were no running refrigerators in the stadium. Drinks were served from unplugged freezer cases stuffed with ice. The reason I heard for this was that a recent earthquake had required a nearby nuclear power plant to go offline (presumably for safety checks) and that the LOC was concerned about the power draw at the stadium and therefore cut wherever they could.

Perhaps the Valencia LOC should have taken the hint. On the third day of competition, shortly before the afternoon session started, the power went out in our section of the press tribune. I wouldn’t consider this a serious problem—I work with a laptop, and therefore switch to battery power without actually noticing the outages at first—but it brought our ethernet router down as well, so it knocked me offline. What’s more, the network’s return lagged the return of power by several minutes.

This went on to happen repeatedly through the course of the afternoon, including the critical juncture where the women’s high jump went from five jumpers to two. It was frustrating for me, to say the least, but at least I knew I wasn’t the only one; I could hear my editor, down the line, making some caustic remarks into his cell phone. (He also got his digs in the opening sentence of this article.)

I might have saved myself if I had multi-homed—that is, if I had made note of the password for the arena wifi network and had been able to switch from my wired connection to the wireless. But I hadn’t, and I’m not actually sure if that was working any better than the wired network.

With China talking about closing down pollution-generating facilities around Beijing during the Olympics, I have to wonder about the power supply in the Birdcage. Reporters are using more electricity every year; if you want an idea of how much power a wireless network uses, check the expected battery life on your laptop with the wireless switched off and switched on. I wonder if brown-outs will be an expected part of championship meets in coming years.

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