Day 1, Athens, June 24th 2000

Dear Diary !

It had been a demanding travel all the way down to the land of gods, but seeing the gathering of the crowd here on mount olymp let us forget that hellish ride easily. Rumour had been spread that Mike Wallace himself would ignite the torch and pass it to our track manager later that night. After having debated about what to do next we decided to find a place to rest our horses and find a pub to refresh ourselves.  In the very first tavern we explored, we came across indy and hoopman who claimed to have been arrived much earlier though having left paris one day later. The ferry ticket on their table told a little story about unmentioned shortcuts....  After the one or other greek wine (disgusting!) we shouldered our completely drunken comrade supernova and helped hakim with finding his horse B. HILLBILLY - it´s a well known weakness of him that he always forgets about the current location of his star horses... Our group marched all the way up to the mount olymp, where thousands of locals and very many sim sports enthusiasts from all around the world had already gathered and taken seats. When we came across Lady´s Secret and Kate from vermont, who organize the equinics, I noticed that my clothes had fallen into pieces during the one week´s ride and felt a little uncomfortable. The others didn´t look much better though and so I decided to ignore the fact that we looked like a bunch of beggars. It was a quite long ceremony with all those national anthems to play and I noticed that our fellow staff member oldsorrel had fallen asleep after the british hymn. How typical, I thougt... But even that part of the evening came to an end and we walked up the stairway to the equinic flame. It was a very special moment when Mike Wallace passed the torch to hakim, though it almost turned into a desaster! Quite confused and more than little groggy, stefanus tried to light a cigarette with the holy torch - luckily richter could stop him in time, so we didn´t really ruin the moment.... We were quite relieved when we left the stadium with our horses, hakim carrying the symbol of true sportsmanship and the rest of us lamenting about having to ride all the way back to paris....

... continues..