The Olympic journal of an International Technical Official

My Tokyo 2021 journey starts here

With every Olympic Games, the host country provides the largest number of the Officials. As I am sure you can appreciate, a number of sports do not have experienced local officials in every sport, so for many of us training is a key part of our role. It is certainly an interesting experience as we all work to accommodate many cultures and languages. The reward of seeing everyone perform their roles as a team and with such expertise on the day is immense. It is their Games and seeing their pride is very moving. 

Preparing for the Games
An integral part of the preparation is the Test Event. This is the first time you meet your colleagues and your wider team. One challenge is that a significant majority of the team usually do not have English as a first language so agreeing short easy words for communicating is key. This event is also where you get to meet the majority of the local volunteers and is the opportunity to really help them make it their Games. 

An interesting challenge at Rio was that the team we trained with was changed before the actual Games. With a two-year gap between the Test Event and now, we run the same risk at Tokyo but of course, these challenges are all part of the fun. My number two this year is one of the most senior people in the Japanese Equestrian Federation. My main role is to let her take the lead and be there to support when needed. 
The one thing you can guarantee is that things will happen that you have never seen before. The Games are unique and challenges are many. We just work as a team to find a way to overcome them. 

About Equestrian eventing
I am part of the Equestrian eventing team. Eventing is a sport of three parts: dressage (many say gymnastics for a horse), cross country (jumping solid fences at 25 miles per hour over three miles) and show jumping. (Safety is obviously critical and many of the solid fences have ‘deformative’ devices that collapse when hit with a certain level of impact (a challenge I will come to later!)
Each phase takes place on a different day. A challenge for many Olympics is finding three miles of grass in a city centre to hold the cross-country phase. How lucky we were for London 2012 to have Greenwich Park!  As you can imagine, space in Tokyo is at a real premium. Our cross-country venue is a reclaimed island with an amazing view overlooking the city centre and the rowing will take place in the causeway next to it. 

Controlling the nerve centre
The ‘nerve centre’ is at the heart of each event and this year I will be the ‘Controller’ on the cross-country day. Effectively, this means I have overall control of the centre with responsibility for coordinating all that happens on the field of play and around it. We have judges at every fence, timekeepers, radio operators, fence repair teams, doctors, vets to name a few. The role of the team I work with is to make sure these people are all where they should be. We also work with the spectator service crew to ensure they do not go where they should not. 
The biggest and most influential group is broadcasters. They very much dictate the timing of any event so it fits their global broadcast schedule. They expect you to start on time, to the minute and finish on time. You are put under quite a lot of pressure but overarching it all is safety. It is our role to make sure that all the right medical resource is available for both horse and human. We will often have three competitors on the course at a time. If there is an injury, the competitors (and their horses!) need to be stopped before they get to where the injury is. To be as fair as possible, we always try to give them an easier fence so that when they restart they are not starting with the most difficult fence on the course. (If you do, keep out of the Riders Bar afterwards!) Every time a horse is stopped, we need to make sure the Officials record their time. And when they restart, all their times have to be entered into the central scoring system in the ‘nerve’ centre and this feeds straight through to the broadcast results you all see. There is zero tolerance for scores being incomplete by the time the horse finishes the course so this all has to be completed in the running time of the horse. The Chief Judge also sits in the nerve centre. We have screens for all the obstacles on the course so they can view every judging decision made. If they need UAR, my team works with the broadcasting team to get the replays. We don’t stop the competition – the horse keeps going. Again, all judging decisions have to be finalised by the time a horse completes. My team also oversee entering all the scoring into the computers, which has to be validated within 10 minutes of the last horse completing. 

Fence down!
My test of nerves is what I mentioned earlier – the deformative devices. Given the weight of the some of the jumps, if one of these devices is triggered someone needs to reset them. The best teams would normally do it in two minutes but it can take up to four minutes. And consider these facts: the horses run at four-minute intervals and it takes 30 seconds to radio to get a horse stopped. So your choices are to a) trust in your repair team or b) stop the horse. Stopping competitors definitely disrupts their flow and maybe impacts their chances. Plus, as you always avoid stopping them at a difficult fence, if you have to choose an earlier fence, you may have cut your four minutes to three. And you have 30 seconds to make a decision. It just keeps you on your toes the whole time.

Keeping communications going
We have about 30 people in the nerve centre with loads of screens so nothing happens on the field of play we don’t know about. To keep in contact with everything going on we have over 400 radios, split into about 12 groups. I have earpieces on two of the key groups. A skill I have built up over many years (or ears!) is to have one conversation going on in each ear, hold a conversation in the room and watch 12 screens at the same time. If you have ever wondered how I can hear what is going on in the office whilst chatting to someone else you now know! 

At the end of the day, we are there to help the judges make the right decisions and the riders have the safest and best opportunity to compete successfully. And if all the international Officials can contribute to making it the best Games for Japan then we consider that a job well done.