The World Championsips, Day 1!

Finally, it was time! The Championships began on Saturday, August 15th at 9:00 am sharp. My seats for the first day were awesome, 14th row right behind the hammer circle and one of the shot circles. Which was perfect, because on this day was the Men's Shot and Hammer qualifying rounds, as well as the finals of the men's shot later that night.
This was the view from my seat. You can see the shot putters getting ready to warm up.

This is a shot of Cantwell walking off after automatically qualifying for the final later that night.

HAMMER TIME:
Primoz Kozsmus of Slovenia walking off after automatically qualifying with one throw.

Sergei Litvinov Jr of Germany (Son of two time world champion, Olympic Champion, and former world record holder Sergei Litvinov) walks off after qualifying for the final.

Olli-Pekka Karjalainen of Finland coming over to talk to his coach after one of his throws.
Sergei Litvinov getting interviewed after qualifying. The dude is my age (23) and he qualified for the final in the World Championships in the hammer...not to many guys his age have done that!
A shot of the spider-cam, a camera hanging from cables that moved up, down, and all around that side of the stadium.
AG Kruger of the USA before taking his warm-up throws.
Libor Charfreitag of Slovakia taking a warm-up throw.

Markus Esser of Germany warming up.

Krisztian Pars of Hungary, the favorite to win, warms up.
Jake Freeman of the USA warming up.

Markus Esser talking to his coach during the competition. Coaches are not allowed down on the infield, so they have to sit in the stands while their athletes try to come over to talk to them.
The competition now done, the throwers are led off the field with the top 12 advancing to the finals on Monday night.
Me, Markus Esser, and my teammate Paul. There were lots of athletes just walking around outside the stadium during the championships...made for some great photo opportunities!

So after the morning session was a lunch of Currywurst, which is sausage cut up into little pieces with curry sauce, and Berliner Pilsener...guess what that is. After hanging out outside the stadium for a few hours, it was time to go back in for the evening session.

Evening Session Pictures

Ireland's flag entering the stadium in the opening ceremonies. I'm half Irish, hence the picture. If you're wondering, my other half is German, and you'll see plenty of German flags in other pictures.
The American flag enters the stadium...go USA!!

The flags of all the participating nations lined up on the track. The German flag is on the jumbotron at the back of the stadium.
Reese Hoffa (USA) and Tomasz Majewzski (Poland, last year's Olympic Champion and the favorite to win the World Champs) about to release their first throws in the finals.
Adam Nelson (USA) and Christian Cantwell (USA) in the back of the circle, about to throw.

For those of you that didn't watch it or don't follow throwing, Majewszki, the Polish thrower, was favored to win, as I said. Cantwell opened up with a very solid throw in the first round, that held the lead until Majewski re-claimed the lead in the 4th round (I think). Meanwhile, Ralf Bartels of Germany got a lifetime best, rocketing him into 3rd place, surprising everyone. In the 5th round, Majewszki extended his lead further with a massive throw of almost 72 feet. So going into his 5th round throw, Cantwell was in the silver medal position, with Majewszki in 1st and Bartels of Germany in 3rd. Cantwell responded with a massive 72 foot, 3 inch throw that put him back on top! Majewszki couldn't respond in the last round, and Cantwell got the gold medal, with Majewszki getting silver and Bartels getting bronze, which the German crowd went WILD for.

Majewszki, the favorite, settles for silver.

Cantwell and Bartels congradulate eachother on their respective medals.

Cantwell wins! He stands alone, the best shot putter in the world!

The medallists take their victory lap.

And to top the night off, I got to meet Lance Deal, the American record holder in the hammer throw! In 1996 he threw 82.52m/270'-8.75 inches. He's now retired and was at the Championships as a coach.

It was an AWESOME first day!

In case you're wondering why I didn't post any videos, don't worry...I got all the hammer qualifying and one of the shot qualifying circles on a video camera. At the time of writing this I haven't yet sent the footage in to Macthrow, but I plan on it soon.

Berlin...T-minus one day to the championships

I slept until around noon the day before the championships. I had read about a beach on a large lake that was only a train ride away from the Berlin city center called Stradband am Wansee (which I think roughly translates to "The beach at lake Wan") so I decided to go there. I bought a Tageskarte, or Day Ticket, at the train stop. For 6.50 euros, this ticket would allow me unlimited rides on any train, subway, or bus in the entire city from the time I bought it until 3 am the next day...not a bad deal, considering I had to take two trains and a bus to get to the beach. Once again, it was fairly easy to get to, though...Berlin has one hell of a public transport system. So anyway, I got to the beach...

It wasn't as late in the day as some of the pictures might make it seem, it was just cloudy. It rains 300-350 days per year in Berlin, so I guess I got real lucky with the weather! Another one of those big chess boards was at another beach I saw while I was there, I guess they're a staple of German beaches? The rest of the pictures just show the beach, which was very nice. The water wasn't too cold, but did have lots of (what I'm hoping was) algae floating through it that kind of gave it a greenish hue. It wasn't too bad though, and there were showers for when you got out of the water if you wanted to rinse off. There was a nude beach there as well (with a strict no photography rule), but it was not well hidden, at all. There was a wall on the beach dividing the nude beach from the regular one, but it didn't extend all the way up or down the beach, and if one of the nudists wanted to go for a swim, you could see them in the water anyway. Its amazing what a lifetime of meat and beer will do to the human body.

After I left the beach I realized I was literally one train stop over from Potsdam, so I decided to go check it out a bit. Here's what I found after wandering for a bit...

The first picture is of Nickolaikirche (St. Nickolai's Church), which was a church built in 1837 that was currently undergoing renovations - it seemed like a lot of Potsdam was. The other picture is the Altes Rathaus, a town hall from the 1800's with a statue of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders on top. I decided to go into Nickolaikirche for a closer look.

A picture of the altar......and a picture of the dome. The dome was HUGE and as you can see, I couldn't even fit the whole thing in a picture. There was a small room that had an exhibit on the history of the church and explaining the renovations it was undergoing, but it was all in German so I couldn't understand most of it. I did, however, find out you can go walk around the top of the dome. So, after going up two VERY narrow spiral staircases (it would have been impossible for one person to go up while another was coming down, so the staircases had traffic lights!) I arrived at the top, and what a view!

In the last picture, you can see the statue of Atlas on top of the Altes Rathaus. It was an amazing view indeed. After walking around the top of the dome a few times it actually started to get late so I decided to head back to Berlin. Before I went back to my hotel though, I decided to get off at a random, major train station and just get out and explore. I ended up getting out at Zoologischergarten, a stop near the Berlin zoo. The part of the city it was in was almost like Times Square in NYC, just a little calmer and not as bright at night. I snapped this picture in in a store window, which was an advertisment for the world championships. You can't see it in this picture, but the guy ironing his shoelaces had javelins next to him. It seemed to be a big deal that the World Championships were coming to Berlin.

All the walking around got me hungry, but I didn't know enough German, or have the cajones to try and order food in a restaurant. I came across a food stand with english translations on the menu, and one of the things available was "Pizza with Meat", which of course I decided to get. I grabbed a beer out of the cooler (yup, they sell beer everywhere in Germany, and you can drink it everywhere) and ordered the pizza with meat. This is what I got... It turns out I really ordered Turkische Pizza mit Donerfleisch, or Turkish Pizza with Doner Meat. A Doner (there should be those little dots over the O) is Turkish fast food, from what I understand...lamb meat with salad in a square pita bread type thing. Turkish pizza is a round, flat thing like the pizza we know, but when you get Turkish pizza with salad and meat, they wrap it up like you see in the picture. It was DELICIOUS. I need to find a Turkish district in NYC or something so I can have it again, it was that amazing.

If you're wondering, Berlin has the highest Turkish population in the world, outside of Turkey. Hence the Turkish influence on Berlin's culture, and the popularity of Doner Kebaps. I'm getting hungry for Turkish Pizza now just writing about this... The best part was the German beer (this time, Warsteiner) to wash it down.

A little side story, I finished the Turkish pizza before I finished my beer...so I just brought my beer with me on the train and finished it on the way back to my hotel. Yup, you can drink beer anywhere in Germany. What a country!

Berlin, Germany...Day 1

I arrived in Germany at what seemed like a million o'clock in the morning, but I think it was around 8 am? I got to my hotel jet lagged as hell, and after a bit of unpacking, took a nap until about 12 noon. Once I woke back up I was still tired but I decided to try to stay awake for the rest of the day to get back on to a regular schedule. The first order of business was finding out how I was going to get to the Olympic Stadium. I knew there was a train station near my hotel, I just had to find it. (If you want to see a bigger version of any of these pictures, just click on it). These are pictures of what I'm assuming is a WWI memorial (it had a list of names from the years 1914-1918 around the wall) right near my train station, so I passed it a few times every day. Can anyone translate that german text?

Getting to the stadium wasn't to complicated, just one stop on two trains. German public transport is completely on the honor system, I found out. You buy a ticket from a machine then validate it at another...but there's no gate, and no ticket checker. If you wanted to you could just not pay and get on the train. However, ticket checkers do ride on the trains/busses from time to time, and the one time I saw one he wasn't wearing a uniform or anything like that. Just a guy in civilian clothes who, in the middle of the ride, got up, showed everyone an official ID, and demanded to see everyone's tickets. Its a 40 euro fine if you ride without a ticket, and they apparently never accept the "I'm just a dumb tourist" excuse.

So, I got to the Olympiastadion.

This was outside the Olympic Stadium, two days until the championships. Those banners (the middle picture) were everywhere in the city, and to the right is a picture of the street sign for Jesse Owens Allee, the road right in front of the stadium. After wandering around a bit and having my first bratwurst (awesome) and first German beer, Schultheiss (also awesome) I found the bell tower, a massive tower near the Olympiastadion. There was a small museum in there, and an elevator to the top, which of course, I took...

These are: a picture of the bell tower, a view of the Olympic Stadium from the bell tower, the warm up track, the thrower's practice area, and some views of Berlin and around...the bell tower and Olympiastadion are on the western outskirts of Berlin. The last picture is of course the bell in the bell tower. You can see the Olympic rings on it. This, however, is a replica of the original bell from the 1936 Olympics. I'm not exactly sure of the story but somehow the original bell was damaged, then buried sometime in the 50's for some reason. Eventually they dug it up and it now sits right outside of the Olympiastadion...there's a picture of it later.

I took a different route back to my hotel and stopped off in what seemed like an old section of Berlin with lots of old architecture, a big church, and cobblestone roads, not all of which cars could drive on. There were also some banks and a Burger King as well! Here's a picture -

I eventually found a pizza place where I got two square slices of pizza, that they cut up into even smaller squares and you ate with a fork. This also came with a glass of beer, of course...this time I went with Hefeweissen. I poured what I thought was some salt on to the pizza, which in fact turned out to be sugar. They had no pepper, garlic, oregano, or anything like that to put on your pizza, just sugar. It actually was pretty good.

After that I just took a train back to the road my hotel was on, got a drink at a bar on the way back, got another drink at the hotel bar, then off to bed.