Bonjour from Switzerland

Yes, they speak French in Lausanne. Greetings readers! It's my frist blog of the Olympic Odyssey trip and I am very excited. Today was our first full day in Switzerland and it was probably the highlight of the trip. We trekked down the street to the official International Olympic Committee headquarters. For all you Olympic newbs out there, the IOC basically runs the entire games. They select the city for the Olympic games and decide how the revenue from the games gets split up. The IOC also works to promote Olympism and lead the Olympic Movement throughout the world. This means encouraging fair play, ethics in sport, the regular celebration of olympics and much more.
Timo Lumme is the Managing Director of the IOC Television and Marketing Services. He and his team  explained to our group how much market research goes into the Olympic games to find out the publics opinion of multiple categories. For example, 95% of the world recognizes the the Olympic Rings symbol, however, unexplainably, only 91% of the U.S. recognizes it. I found that to be very shocking because the Olympics have been held in the U.S. a number of times, Salt Lake City being the most recent in 2002. The IOC strives to reach 100% recognition. Lumme and his crew also explained how even the distribution of the fans of the Olympics are. There is almost a 50/50 split between males and females and close to even distribution of age groups amongst Olympic fans. As a Public Relations major, I was very fascinated with how the IOC went about finding the different perceptions of the games.
After the IOC lecture, we hiked down to the Olympic Museum that was currently held on a boat off of the museum because the museum is currently undergoing renovations. On the boat, the museum had a timeline with significant achievements for each of the games, dating back to 1896. There was also a video page that showed clips of some of the most amazing moments in Olympic history, such as the '92 Dream Team, Michael Phelps and Usuain Bolt. While I do wish I could have seen the whole museum, the boat did its justice.
Today we are trying to have a beachside cookout for dinner, but it looks like rain so I'm not sure of the certainty of it. The food around here seems great though, and I'd be happy eating anywhere.
It's your lucky week because I get to blog again tomorrow, when I will update you on our lecture with CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sport). Should be very interesting.

Goodbye for now!

-Ian Teti