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U.S. Olympians move through the Bay Area
About 900 in all to be processed at San Jose State
Let the processing begin.The send-off to the Beijing Games started Friday, with five rowers going through the U.S. Olympic processing center at San Jose State to pick up credentials, uniforms and get tutored on behavior. The brief stop - about 24 hours for each athlete - is the traditional start of the whirlwind journey to the Games.
"You don't feel like you're on the Olympic team until you go through that,'' three-time Olympian Brenda Villa, a water polo player who graduated from Stanford, said recently.
Over the next three weeks the downtown campus will serve as a mini-Olympic village for a rolling cast of about 600 athletes and 300 coaches and staff members who are heading to the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.
The first big push of athletes arrived Saturday with the 42-member American swim team that features Michael Phelps, Natalie Coughlin and Dara Torres.
All athletes, from the likes of the Lakers' Kobe Bryant to the most obscure field hockey player, will go through the same routine.
The majority of athletes will be housed at the Campus Village residence in the southeast corner of SJSU.
Because of security concerns, the public will be prohibited from the parts of campus where the athletes are congregating, and there are no public events scheduled on campus at this time. Although some teams, such as women's basketball and men's soccer, have scheduled practices in the area, most training sessions will be closed.
The one exception so far is women's volleyball, which will hold an intrasquad scrimmage at 5 p.m. July 31 at Haas Pavilion on the Cal campus in Berkeley. The players will sign autographs afterward.
It takes about a day to process each athlete. Teams usually arrive together in the afternoon and are sized for apparel and rings. Then they hit the "shopping mall,'' which is "like Christmas,'' said Villa, who helped the U.S. team win a silver in 2000 and a bronze in 2004. "You go to this big warehouse and they give you a shopping cart. We don't do this to get all this cool stuff, but it is definitely a perk.''
Athletes can expect to collect about $1,300 worth of clothing. In past years, Olymp-ians walked away with sweatsuits, shirts, shoes, hats, luggage, blazers and extras such as neck pillows for their long flights.
After they pack their goodies, the USOC transports them overseas. The delegations will fly to Beijing from San Francisco International Airport for the Summer Olympics, scheduled for Aug. 8-24.
Olympic officials are placing more emphasis on behavior this year. Although many of the athletes have been coached on conduct, they are expected to attend briefings at SJSU on Chinese customs and rules.
"They remind us that the world already has a bad image of Americans,'' Villa said. "We need to act appropriately to try to help that image.''
Jim Scherr, USOC chief executive, said last year he "wants to make sure the athletes understand the stage they are on. The opening ceremony will be the most watched TV event at that point in time.''
The USOC began sending its athletes through a central processing center in the 1970s. It used Los Angeles for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul; Tampa, Fla., for the Barcelona Games in 1992; and San Diego for the Sydney Games eight years ago. In 2004, the USOC used the American University in Athens to process the delegation.
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