With 2 victories and one 4th place at the Swiss testraces, Bettina Aebi secured herself easily a place inside of both JWOC and NOC Swiss delegations. The 18 years old has already 4 EYOC medals to her credit and will definitively be one of the big Swiss hopes of upcoming JWOC. She obtained a 5th place yesterday in the sprint at NOC 2009 and agreed to tell us a moment of NOC which will stay forever in her mind – for its funny side, she says.
The article was originally written in German.
“The middle distance took place on Tuesday. While the elite runners had all very late starts, we juniors were already going on much earlier. Our trainer drove us from the hotel to the quarantine, where we got on the official bus. The last part of the way to the start and finish area was already familiar to us through the previous races : it was a non-asphalted, pretty thin road. Several hold-ups had already occured in the last days and one had often to wait a while before driving again, for the crossing was quite complicated.
Our bus suddenly stopped 500m before the finish area and our driver asked us to get out. “I have to let you off here, because bus is on the road!” she said in an approximate English. We were all looking one at the other in a perplexe way and hesitantly got off the bus. We had in fact been told over and over again to get around only in the permitted and closed area. There was indeed a second art of quarantine inside of both start and finish area to prevent arriving runners to inform their collegues who hadn’t started yet. We had also to warm up in a restricted area and didn’t really dare to walk now simply to the competition centre. After all no one wanted to be disqualified!
However we finally took to the road and tried to understand the mysterious formulation of our driver. What did she mean to us?
The solution to our speculations appeared to us just a little way further. So there was really “a bus on the road”! The team bus from Sweden was standing in the verge of the road and taking up half of the way… Tracks were showing vain attemps to take the bus out: the handbrake was broken, the bus was stuck in the mud, there were marks from turning circles, people were standing and phoning nervously.
We finally arrived, though a bit late. It appeared that we weren’t the only one who had had to go by foot because of the “bus on the road” and so our worries had been unjustified. When we returned to the hotel, the bus was away and we could pass without problem, the organisators had apparently solved the situation pretty quickly.” - Bettina Aebi
Share with friends: 
Tweet this or 
Stumble this or 
Add to Delicious
