By Philip O’Connor
ZHANGJIAKOU, China (Reuters) – After what seemed like an interminable eight-day wait in a quarantine hotel, Swedish journalist Philip Gadd finally got the call he had been waiting for, releasing him from COVID isolation to do what he had come to do — cover the Olympics.
Gadd wasted no time, high-tailing it to the National Cross-Country Centre in Zhangjiakou, some 200 km north-west of Beijing in time to see Sweden’s Jonna Sundling win gold in the women’s sprint.
“It’s good to see you,” he told a colleague, putting away his video camera and kit after his first event of the Games.
Gadd had swapped a warm hotel room with regular meals delivered to his door for the freezing temperatures of the mountains, but he couldn’t have been happier as he interviewed Sundling in the mixed zone after her triumph.
“I just went to my hotel, dropped my bags. I think we were there for maybe only 10 minutes, and then I just immediately left with a taxi to the cross country skiing and actually it went really good for Sweden. They got the gold and the silver, so it was a perfect start for my new life in Beijing,” he said.
It was a good way to get back to a semblance of normality after eight days in which his working life was virtually suspended, only to end with that phone call.
‘YOU’RE FREE’
“My boss called me and just told me that ‘you’re free’, and I don’t know, I thought that I would be happier, but I was just empty,” he told Reuters at the Olympics media centre in Zhangjiakou.
“I just felt empty, because during these days I’ve spent some time thinking how will it be when I get out … I was mostly just empty, empty and a bit stressed because I wanted to get out and start work.”
While Gadd is a well-known reporter and web TV anchor for Expressen, one of Sweden’s biggest newspapers, he suddenly became a household name when he was whisked away in an ambulance due to a failed PCR test.
He was dressed head to toe in personal protective equipment including a mask, visor, gloves and a one-piece suit before being driven as the only passenger in an ambulance to a hotel where the only way out was two consecutive negative COVID tests.
“You were in a foreign country far away, and it was hard to communicate with the people in the hotel. And that was quite frightening. I never had this kind of experience before and hopefully I’ll never do it again,” the 28-year-old said.
Finally, his second test came back negative and after his period in isolation, Gadd said he was raring to go.
“I’m going to try to work as much as I can. I think that I’ve missed a lot of things here, so I have to. I will do mostly cross country skiing, biathlon, the big sports for Sweden,” he said.
During his period in quarantine, Gadd had plenty of time to think about life’s bigger questions, too.
“I’ve started thinking more about how free I am in my normal life that I can go whatever I want. I can do whatever I want. That kind of thing was something that I thought about quite a lot,” he mused.
“I don’t know if my life will change that much of this to be honest, but I will always have a good story to tell when I have a beer with friends or in the future when I have kids or grandchildren. Maybe I can always tell this story.”
(Reporting by Philip O’Connor; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
