Lost in translation II

This place makes me feel old. I don't think it matters how young or fit you are, or feel you are, everywhere you look there is a thinner, fitter person going for an easy run at 3:45 pace. They are everywhere that is, except the hotel restaurant. They don't eat there, fatty sauces, chicken with the skin on! Eek! They're likely in their rooms eating dry granola with bananas and washing it down with soy-milk for the protein.

So, speaking of athletes, we were in an officials' meeting in the hotel foyer yesterday, the TD, HR and ourselves, when one athlete comes up and asks for directions to the race-site, having got lost trying to find it today. We gave him directions, wished him luck and he went on his way.

Sounds like a normal, everyday occurance; athlete can't find something, asks race officials to help, race officials help, job done. Except he could only speak Spanish and our group could only speak English or French. Eventually, one of us set Google Translate on a lap-top and we had a three-way conversation via that and Google Maps. In hindsight, it was quite funny! As for the hegomony of Google, we can talk about that later.

This story illustrates one of the challenges of working races such as this; the language factor. This weekend has the seeds for a linguistic nightmare. Most of the athletes are Canadian, but then most of those are Quebecers. As we saw first-hand, not all the overseas atheletes speak English. We remember having to communicate significant information at World Dus off the back of Moto#2 to athletes of every linguistic stripe with varying degrees of success. On the officials' side, the Quebec officials are francophone, all but one are bilingual to a greater or lesser degree. This is useful, as we remember staffing a mount/dismount line with unilingual francophone officials once and we pretty much had to communicate by interpretative dance. Dinner was with the same officials, but after two Hoegaardens we were having less difficulties in getting ourselves understood! Despite the TQ officials' knowledge of English, remember the TA is a Brit (and even those of you who know me still ask me to repeat myself once, twice or three times) and the TD is a Newfie. Throw in the radios, which garble voice transmissions anyway, well you get the picture! The official language of the ITU may be English, but when English is in a minority, you have to work around it! Back to interpretative dance then.

At Summerside, a few Newfie expressions were added to the tri lexicon, so expect to hear out of the radios at some point on Sunday "the arse is out of 'er" = "chute" = "please send ambulances" and "I could eat the arse out of a low-flying duck" = "j'ai faim" = "some of the vounteers have been there since 9, could you please send them some food?". Drafting is sillonner, a regular -er verb (je sillonne, tu sillonnes, il/elle sillonne, nous sillonnons etc) but as we're at a draft-legal race we shouldn't have to do any conjugating off the back of Moto#1.

Breaker breaker

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