5 Dec - Me? Line-producer for Live Belt?

Kiok kept me up the whole night with her snoring. I felt bad as this was probably the result of making her work with Biao Shu on the panel for three hours yesterday. Still, I woke up feeling excited as I make my way to the gym thinking that I would be lining the live belt from today onwards. Whow!

Given the slight pain I felt, I took it easy at the gym this morning. I was on a high throughout breakfast. I messaged Erquan that Biao Shu wanted me to line the live belt, and I told Prem that. Prem was good, haha, he said, “Go Fu Fu! Show him how it should be done!”

My initial plan was to record Badminton Men’s Singles, Round of 32, Kendrick Lee versus Sasaki Sho of Japan at 0940hr and playback later. But Wendy suggested that I used Li Li’s game instead as he lost, and she won with rubber set against Kojima Hiroyuki of Japan. The whole game lasted about an hour. Added to the live swimming events, that would buy me at least two hours. I have an hour more to fill.

Running through the Games schedule, Simon kept pestering me about putting in beach volleyball. So I thought, why not? But it would be the men’s games that we could playback in order to release machines for TAG editing. So I put down Men’s Beach Volleyball, Malaysia versus Oman. Both Simon and Wendy protested! Saying that it would be nice to see the girls play. With the promise that he would take care of women’s beach volleyball, Kazakhstan against Japan at 1700hr.

Given the relatively quiet morning, Jusri decided to play a prank on Halid. Using the light stand, he locked Halid up inside the machine room and shouted for him to come out. After being bullied for several days, Halid did not respond.

With Vivian pestering him for the highlights packaged by TVNZ, Jusri left the lightstand there and went out. Valerie Teo and Michelle Kwang have won Singapore’s first gold medal the Women’s Doubles in Bowling. They played till 2.30am and we didn’t have the manpower to keep up. Though the people back home weren’t happy that we didn’t get footage of that, they just have to accept the fact that we were all doing the best we could over here. The rest of us carried on with our work and soon forgot about Halid being locked up.

A couple of hours later, Halid banged at the door. It was then that we remembered he was still locked up inside. Wendy came out and asked what happened. Kiok related the story to her, and even said Jusri is a clever kid.

Prem came back with the news of Peter Gilchrist taking the bronze medal for the Men’s Singles in English Billiards. But according to him, he should have done better than this since he was a former world champion. This was initially my scoop story, as cuesports was assigned to me. Too bad that I have to be at base this time round. Maybe when Erquan comes back?

As the minutes ticked by, my adrenaline level increased. Then Biao Shu and Prem came back from their swimming and sailing respectively. I went through the lineup for livebelt with Biao Shu. At 1800hrs, we went live. Two swimming races later, I sort of calm down for a bit. But as the beach volleyball has yet to end, I went ahead with Li Li’s game first after three live swimming races, skipping all the medal presentations and back to live swimming with JB doing RVO from segment to segment.

It was organised chaos as the lineup was being switched around. In and out points of the recorded items were constantly being changed to accommodate the live swimming events, and with Kazakhstan and Japan going into a rubber set for beach volleyball. JB’s face was flushed red throughout. We were all running on adrenaline as I frantically calculated durations for the live belt while typing in CG for TAG.

Ghandi brought back some good news from the Bowling Centre. Our Men's Trios of Jason Yeong, Lee Yuwen and Remy Ong have bagged the silver medal. He has been at the bowling centre alone since Day 1 of this competition.

I didn’t realise that beach volleyball played till 15 points and not the usual 21 for the rubber set. It hit everyone after Simon said the duration of the last set was 13 minutes. And he actually drooled while watching. Kiok went "Si Gin Na! Kua ka lau nua!" I would under-run for 5minutes. Right now, my main concern was if TAG was ready to go. Biao Shu suggested throwing in something just for the purpose of filling up the time. But I refused. Since TAG was ready to go, I would rather under-run for a bit.

With TAG also under-running, we ended our show for the night about seven minutes before 2am. Lesson I would never forget – Beach Volleyball plays to only 15 points for rubber set. Erquan didn’t say much.

I kept telling myself to have only soup for dinner. But every time I failed to adhere to that rule. Prem and Vivian have been egging each other for ice-cream every night, with Kiok taking part. Oh well, gym tomorrow!!