We found some riders for our horses today. The four riders (Heather Blitz, Marisa Festerling, Cesar Parra and Steffen Peters), their Chef d’Equipe (Eva Salomon), their Technical Advisor (Anne Gribbons) and their team leader (Jenny van Wieren-Page) arrived in full team kit in the Guadalajara airport. We were sorry to not have any sunshine to offer them – but Hurricane Jova really needs to get on his way out of here. I was expecting to come back from this trip with a tan!

Swimming has 73 athletes and 90 people staying in the village so they dwarfed our squad but we got on our way far more quickly once the Dressage delegation arrived at the Guadalajara airport. The TV crew interviewed Cesar Parra, they were very relieved to have a Spanish speaking athlete - and Cesar obliged.

They headed to the hotel, had some lunch and then headed out to see their horses. Everyone was relieved to finally see the horses and grooms. The got on in the rain and basically had the warm-up to themselves for an hour. We have such a variety of horses in this group but they are all very good at their jobs and looked really happy to be getting some exercise.

We got a tour of the Guadalajara Country Club and it is one of the nicest club’s in Mexico. They have been incredibly gracious and offered our riders, their guest and a chef d’Equipe access to the club. I expect them to all have a vastly improved tennis game before these Games are over…

The Blackberry outage has caused significant issues for those of us totally dependent on our phones. There are no photos because those are all on my phone and I cannot get them transferred to the website… I will keep trying and I know you will have them eventually. Right now I am looking at a lot of red Xs and clocks. What happened before we could take pictures on our phones and upload them to the internet? Film? Polaroids? Smoke signals?

More tomorrow,
Joanie