Junior Worlds 2018 - Blog #2

It’s business as usual here. We arrived in Vienna around 7:30 AM (12:30 AM in River Falls).  The flight was nice and smooth.  I watched The Avengers: Infinity Wars and gave some of the snacks Liz packed to Ali and Macey to be sure they weren’t eating the airplane meals.  Then I took the opportunity to get some sleep. Sleep will likely be at a mnimium over the next week with the schedule demands, weight management and time zone change.  

I didn’t check any luggage. I’ve experienced too many “lost luggage” moments during my travels overseas, both personally and with teammates. I spent an entire week in Baku, Azerbaijan at the World Championships wearing Troy Steiner’s dirty clothes because I only had my USA warm-up top.  My clothes were in another European city that was not hosting a wrestling tournament. Another time I had to borrow workout gear from a young wrestler while in Moscow when my luggage didn’t make it on the same flight as me.  Needless to say, I stuff everything into a lumberjack print carry-on and put my computer, books and snacks in a backpack adorned with five “backpack charms” that my boys attached to the zipper.

On this flight, more than half of our flight spent an hour at the turnstyle waiting for their bags.  Frustration led many of them to the arrival service desk. The panic turned into relief when it was announced that they skipped over an entire wagon of luggage on the tarmac. Everyone was relieved when their bags finally arrived.  To say there was stress in the baggage claim is an understatement, but it all worked out.

One of the most important things that our athletes need to be prepared for when they travel overseas is for unexpected things to occur.  This is not the United States.  We’re pretty spoiled, in a sense, but mostly we’re just really comfortable with the way things operate back home.  Life is just different outside of the States.  Not bad, just different.  We all value different things and pay attention to different things.  Things that are important to us in the States are sometimes not on the radar of people in other places in the world, and vice-versa. Ethnocentrism is not a favorable trait when traveling to different parts of the world.  To be successful on the international sports scene, you have to be able to roll with the punches a bit.  

Schedules might change last minute, shuttle rides might fill up or randomly disappear and workout facilities might be closed and unavailable when you want them.  There's usually a lot of waiting around and a language barrier.  That’s all very manageable, though.  It’s important that we’re not so rigid that we can’t adapt on the fly.  For example, we were scheduled for a bus ride from the Vienna airport to our hotel, however, United World Wrestling put the women’s delegation in a separate hotel in Senec (about 10 miles from Trnava), so we got our own microbus.  

The drive from Vienna to Senec is an hour and the scenery looks like the Midwest with corn fields, wind turbines and cyclists on the rural roads.  Once we crossed the border into Slovakia, the Eastern European look took over the landscape as we drove through Bratislava, the capital city.  It’s a bit of a mix between a modern Westernized city and old tenement-style living.  Think cement apartment complexes with cream pantones surrounding newly constructed buildings with big tinted windows.

So far, everything is pretty standard for a trip like this and the girls are in good spirits.  We’ll spend the day acclimating and then get to business.  Many of us are missing a week of school to spend time in Europe, but this is no vacation. It’s a business trip.