Fog has engulfed the mountains above Krasnaya Polyana. We're in the clouds.
The men's 15km mass start was cancelled tonight and rescheduled twice, first for 8 p.m. and then 10 a.m. Monday morning.
(UPDATE: The race was rescheduled again, this time for 3:30 Monday. And then put off a fourth time until Tuesday.)
On Sunday night, we packed up our gear and joined 5,000 spectators and hundreds of reporters and other staff to walk toward the two gondolas that would whisk us all down the hill.
We enforced ourselves with beer, tall cans of Russia's Baltika No. 8.
Fans had been drinking for hours when they started their return to their cars and hotel rooms. The figures around us disappeared in the fog but we could hear a Norwegian fan blowing a horn and could still make out the colours of face paint and flags when we drew close enough to the people around us.
At the gondola, two lines stretched for at least a kilometre each. We waited at an empty bar and ordered more beer. (Incredibly void of people, however the bar had already sold out of mulled wine.)
The foggy trek made one of my Russian colleagues think of the animated Soviet film, Hedgehog in the Fog.
An award-winning short by Yuriy Norstein from 1975, Hedgehog in the Fog is whimsical, wistful and surreal. It's an utter darling of a film. (Watch it and don't miss the hedgehog calling an owl "Psycho!")
The fog thickens and thins around us just as it does the hedgehog.
