Welcome to PyeungChang 2018

The journey

After a pleasant flight from Düsseldorf, with a short stop in Abu Dhabi, I arrived at the Incheon airport next to Seoul. My journey continued with a 4h bus ride to the very eastern region of South-Korea, passing through beautiful snowy landscapes shaped by mountains and frozen (!) rivers. 

Last week was quite cold (with snowfall and temperatures reaching -15°) and even though the display in the bus was showing "mild" 2°, some of the waterfalls I saw outside were still just a pile of ice... I could tell that I am going in the right direction towards the Winter Olympics.

Maybe your next winter holiday location?

It is here that the world’s best athletes will compete from Feb 9^th to Feb 25^th for more than 100 gold medals, making this Winter Olympics the biggest ever. The competitions will take place at two locations:

Pyeongchang - Mountain cluster for sports like skiing, snowboard, biathlon
Gangneung - Coastal cluster for ice sports like curling, ice hockey, speed skating

My bus stopped in Gangneung, a rather smaller city with a population of 210.000 at the eastern coast of Korea. I have reached my destination...

What am I doing here?

Unfortunately, I am not good enough at any of the 15 Olympic sport disciples (at least, not that I know of) and therefore cannot compete at one of 102 events of PyeongChang Olympics. In fact, some sports like ski jumping or bobsleigh I have left completely untried so far, so no way I can start my professional athlete career here. Note to myself: try out more Olympic winter sports, they are really cool.

Also, Covestro is neither promoting the Games (#whynot) nor do we have our own snowboarding team (#whynot) - so you might be asking yourself what exactly am I doing here? I surely did not come to try out ski jumping, that would end up bad. I am here to learn about organizing big projects/events during my training and support the project team.

That fits well J

Atos, the worldwide IT partner of the Olympic Games with 28 years of experience in this area, will provide and manage critical IT applications for the Games – including the distribution of results in real time to all relevant partners, different channels and billions of devices. It is a huge IT project in the background, seamless for the athletes and viewers, which will enable a “digital customer experience” for all the people around the globe following the competition (#digital #dcj).

As you might know, Atos is also one of Covestro’s IT partners. To strengthen the partnership, an employee exchange program/training was organized. And this is where I come in. In my new role as Venue Result Manager, I will be trained by the very experienced Atos team on site in areas like big event management/project management and then make sure the capturing and distributing of competition results to partners (e.g. TV or radio stations) via different channels (mobile apps, web platforms, EDI) and devices (mobile, PC, printers) are performing well throughout the games (#EDI #S2S #soundsfamiliar).

My new workplace for the next couple of weeks.

The venue that was assigned to me during the training is curling / speed skating. Two interesting sports I’ve never tried before. Check out the rules of curling here in case you are not familiar with it.

A look behind the scenes

After visiting the curling venue, meeting my new colleagues and going into the office for the training sessions, one thing got clear to me – I had absolutely no idea how much effort, resources and time are required in order to organize and run the Games or any other big sport event.

Wow!

As a “normal” viewer, all these things happening in the background were quite seamless to me as I have never actually paid attention to this. I focused on the sports, the game, the emotions and experience connected to it...

How you see the Games

All the interesting and complex activities behind the scenes have been invisible to me – until now. After looking behind the scenes, I will never be able to watch a sports game from the same point of view again :)

How I see the Games

I have much to learn about the applications, processes and rules of Olympics while we are still in the middle of the preparation phase. The Games are starting soon and I can't wait!

Stay tuned for more news & best regards from Korea!