Josiah Ng is a Lenovo Athlete blogger and a track cyclist (I sent him a picture of my fixie — the Snotrocket — and he thought that was cool though his fcycle costs about a gazillion dollars and wins Olympic medals and mine is a salvaged garage survivor).
He’s blogging and wrote this post about what it felt like to march in with the Malaysian contingent on Friday night. While the rest of us marveled from the stands and the television, he did it from the track and the floor:
“The most exciting part would be when we first walked out into the stadium in front of a hundred thousand screaming people. I can’t explain the feeling but I had goosebumps all over me. We were the 10th country out of 204 to walk out. The first country was Greece and the last was China. The roar from the crowd was deafening as the Chinese contingent was announced. Towering over everyone was Yao Ming, their flag bearer.
By the end of the night, we had stood for over 5 hours so our feet were screaming pain. On top of that everyone was sweating through their clothes because of the heat and humidity. I’m just glad we didn’t have to wear suits like some of the countries. They were literally drenched in sweat. But at the end it was all worth it.
The experience of attending an opening ceremony as an Olympic athlete is absolutely priceless! I’ll never forget last night. One funny thing that I saw as we were exiting the stadium was an American woman crying. She was weeping of emotion and said this “we’ll never see anything like that ever again.” I guess that should paint a picture of how beautiful the ceremony was!”
How cool is that? What a lucky guy to have that to remember.
