My trip began with leaving home at 4am for the 6am flight to Paris, fortunately the airport is 10 minutes away and I arrived in Paris just before 9am. I started fantasizing about getting to Orleans early, taking the opportunity to check out local places and food, then I realised it was a mistake. It took an hour just to get through the passport control. Further one hour in the arrival hall waiting for the transport to come back from Orleans, while the event volunteers were looking for players and TO's who were supposed to be in the same transport as me, and it didn’t help that we all arrived at different terminals. On top of that, congestion around Paris was worse than anticipated. I arrived at Orleans just before 1:30pm and got dropped off at the hotel which I was quite pleased about. Had I arrived later than that, I would have been dropped off at the venue instead and certainly not looking forward to dragging my luggage all the way from the venue back to the hotel!
There was a small reception with a few speeches from different French associations, where we got to meet the team in person. After that we went to the venue and were given a tour, I must admit it took me couple of days to find my bearings in the building and I was not the only one. Briefing started soon after the tour, presented by the referee team, Teodulfo Villaflor from Philippines, with Jean-Marc Chancerel from France and Ian Ross from England being the deputy referees.
First day of the tournament a few of us met at the hotel to walk to the venue, which took about 20 minutes. We were very lucky as weather had been great throughout the tournament. The hall was nice and spacious with four courts. We were put into groups allocated to specific court and shifts on each day. With the tournament being a Super Series 300, the lines judges were all experienced which certainly made things a lot easier.
The event organiser arranged a guided cultural visit of the city which was on the third day of the tournament. At first I regretted for signing up for it because it means I had to leave the hotel at 8:15am. The tour was about history of art and graffiti which turned out to be very interesting, so I was pleased I did attend. After the tour we hurried back to the venue for group photo and after that I had several hours to kill with my shift not starting until 3:30pm. I ended up going back to the city centre for more sightseeing and shopping…
The tournament went pretty well overall. We were well looked after on and off court. The catering team came up with lovely food every day, and I don’t think I have had so much cheese in my life! There was a balanced mix of umpires with different grades, I felt I was well supported by the team and learned a lot from them. This is my first full experience of a Super Series event, where IRS was being used from semi-finals onwards, and I was selected to be the umpire for one of the matches. On the day of semi-finals, the set up in the hall was changed. Due to the space limitation, they could not fit two courts with TV crew and cameras so only one court was set up to play one match at a time. During my match, I had couple of IRS challenges and survived them all, credits go to Paul De Kuyper as he was my service judge in that match.
On Sunday, I travelled back to Newcastle to get ready to go down on All England on Monday. Unfortunately, my flight got diverted to Edinburgh due to heavy fog in Newcastle. I did not get home until 4am which gave me only a couple of hours’ sleep before hitting the road to Birmingham