Blog: Meanwhile In San Marino

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Since getting back from Edinburgh I have spent most of my time being POORLY. It wasn't exactly how I'd envisioned my glorious return but at least it happened AFTER we'd done the shows, and allowed me to spend ALL of my time in the flat!

As ever, when you've been away for a couple of weeks, I returned to find there had been CHANGES, notably a series of PLAQUES which have gone up in the entrance hallways of all the blocks of flats in The Olympic Village (i.e. where I live but you probably wouldn't know that as I don't like to go on about it). These plaques list the teams that STAYED in the buildings when they WERE the actual Athlete's Village, which is BRILLIANT. One of the first questions people ask when you tell them - I mean, when you are reluctantly forced to reveal - that you live here is "Ooh! Who lived in your flat?" but nobody has ever officially told us before. I don't know why - clearly they know, and it's not like it's a security risk, but it's taken nearly two years of gentle prodding from residents for them to reveal who was in what building.

Finding out who was in which FLAT, however, is still a "secret", although some of us had already done DETECTIVE WORK. There's loads and loads of photographs of the village during the games and if you're prepared to sit and go through THE LOT (e.g. if you had, say, a job when you first moved in that, technically, had run out of things to do months before) you could eventually track down a picture of your flat and, if you were lucky, it would have a FLAG draped over the balcony. Our flat DID and, after a bit more in-depth research (looking at wikipedia) we worked out that some athletes from San Marino had been here.

This was very much CONFIRMED by the plaque so a few days ago I did a bit more research (googling) and discovered that, in all likelihood, it wasn't just *some* of the athletes from San Marino that stayed here, it was THE ENTIRE NATIONAL TEAM!! There were obly four of them - Clelia Tini (100m freestyle swimming), Alessandra Perilli (tap shooting), Martina Pretelli (100m sprint) and Emanuele Guidi (individual archery). Two even more exciting realisations come from this - firstly that we NEARLY had a medallist in the flat (Mr Guidi came 4th in the archery final) and secondly, and more importantly, Ms Pretelli MUST be the person who wore her spikes inside the flat one day and caused the damage to the floor in our hallway that is logged in our inventory!

We were both VERY excited to discover this - it finally puts faces to the vague idea of "athletes" who were here before us and, of course, gives us someone to blame if our landlords discover any more discrepancies next time they visit. "Yes, I know there are Blu Tac marks all over the wall, it must be those Sammarinese again!"

posted 26/8/2015 by MJ Hibbett

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