Steve Dilbeck: The heat is on
We both ducked. We weren’t sure what it was, but it didn’t sound good.
My peer from a Texas newspaper and I looked at each other hoping the other had a quick explanation.
We were sitting in the press venue at Sestriere Borgata. Olympic press venues are essentially temporary press rooms. Up here on the mountain, all but one is an overgrown tent.
As you might imagine, tents propped up in the dead of winter can tend to be on the cold side. As in, freakin’ freezin’.
Wanting international scribes to have feeling at the end of their fingertips when they type, the International Olympic Committee has
been kind enough to require the venues be heated.
Heating these monster tents, some almost the size of your local supermarket, is no simple task.
The solution is interesting, and for some time, unnerving.
The tents have these long lightweight plastic tubes with small holes at the bottom. Some stretch up to 75 yards and are about 3 feet in circumference. Normally they are deflated and suspended by wires from the roof.
But then hot air blows into them with enough force to inflate the entire tube, creating a loud, and certainly at first, disturbing roar.
``It sounded like one of the skiers just landed on the roof,’’ my peer said.
When the room is deemed sufficiently heated, the hot air goes off and the tubes deflate. Until they explode with force a few moments later.
This takes some getting used to, and some venues work better than others. The Pragelato venue for ski jumping apparently has a broken thermostat.
The heat is either just on all the time, giving you’re an odd sauna in the ice feeling, or is off for long durations and leaving you typing with every available garment on.
And waiting for the sound of the next jet landing on the roof.
Leave a comment