Wrestling Blogs - Ben Askren

So here I am in my dorm room at San Jose St., we leave tomorrow from San Fran for Beijing on a direct 13 hour flight. I will be keeping you updated throughout all 20 days of my olympic experience, I will do my best to give you the full un cut version of what goes on behind the scenes at the olympic games. Now while they have already given us a full set of instructions on what not to do in our blogs I will do my best to give you the full experience. So yesterday morning, Monday August 4 I took off at 6:00 am from Mitchell international Airport in Milwaukee. Sunday I came back home to do a fundraiser for my parents and my HS coach's family for the trip to Beijing. It was an outstanding success over 200 people showed up. Back to the trip, I slept all of the first flight and almost missed the second one due to a late start out of milwaukee bc of some weather. The airline companies are really getting more and more unreliable these days, which leaves me to wonder what wil happen after their demise. In Denver I met up with Mocco, Cejudo, KJ and Daryl Miller. I slept most of the second flight also, the summer has been plagued with a lot of traveling and lack of sleep, I woke up and chatted with Daryl before we landed. When we landed we grabbed our stuff and headed to meet the bus driver who took us to down to San Jose where we would do the embassador program and Processing. After we got here we went over to the gym, where we played basketball, then some strange game on the mat with the womens team, and then I wrestled with Henry. I know there is a great size difference there, but Henry and I rolled pretty well, he had a lot more "funk," than I expected. After the workout we met team leader Steve Silver for dinner, he took us to this really nice restaurant called The Grill. After dinner Steve, Henry, KJ, and I played some spades, KJ and I kind of steam rolled them. I went for a run, read some national geographic then went to sleep. Tuesday morning started out with the Embassador program, it was ok, but most of it was just common sense things. Sometimes I get to annoyed when people tell me things that I percieve as common sense, so needless to say I felt it was a waste of my time. After that I went over the the rec center for a little workout. Steve, Henry and I went to the caf for lunch and it was delicious, at this point Daniel, Doug and Andy joined the crew. Kerry and Kemp rolled in shortly after. Then we got to go to processing which I was really looking forward to, we got more stuff then I will ever know what to do with. I think I have christmas presents for everyone I know. But seriously they treated us awesome and gave us some amazing gear. Then we had another meeting and packed our stuff for the trip. Then everyone wanted to go play some more bball. This is probably the highlight of my trip so far but Kerry and I smoked Daniel and Henry 11-6 in the first game, and I was playing barefoot. I cant take too much credit though, because I suck at basketball it was mostly Kerry. It is always fun to beat Daniel though because he thinks he is such a baller. Now I am going to jump in the shower and go to dinner. Peace until next time.