KEY POINTS:
Forget sport's grandest international stars; Luuka Jones' biggest thrill in Beijing has been meeting cycling hero Sarah Ulmer.
But the 19-year-old from Tauranga will have her eyes open in what is a first-time Olympic rite of passage - spot the famous face in the athletes' village.
"I haven't
seen any yet but I hope to," she said.
Jones was the last New Zealand athlete to qualify for Beijing, in the white-water slalom canoeing.
She was "pretty excited" to meet New Zealand's cycling queen, winner of the 3000m individual pursuit in Athens four years ago.
But the reception she got on arriving in Beijing with her coach Tim Baillee this week was also a treat.
Jones is a solo competitor in a sport with a low profile. Getting the full treatment gave her a buzz.
"When Tim and I walked down to the New Zealand apartments everybody was standing there waiting to welcome us with a haka and I was just blown away," she said yesterday.
Her parents, Rod and Denise Jones, arrive on August 10. Jones qualified for Beijing early last month at an event in Slovenia. She cut it fine, but fulfilling her dream with her parents looking on "will be really cool".
The New Zealand village has been filling up this week as athletes have checked in from around the globe.
First in were the men's football team, who have now headed out to their first match venue, Shenyang, led by captain and Blackburn Rovers star defender Ryan Nelsen.
Nelsen, who is used to the unsentimental ways of professional football, was humbled by his first Olympic experience.
"It didn't really hit home until I felt the aura and camaraderie and the pride of the New Zealand camp," he said. "The environment that's been created is something so special and it brings out what it really means to be a Kiwi."
Other arrivals are the women's football squad, the two Black Sticks hockey squads, weightlifters Mark Spooner and Richie Patterson, and the Tall Ferns basketball squad.
The first New Zealanders in action are the Football Ferns, who play Japan in Qinhuangdao on Wednesday night. The men play China before an expected 80,000 the following night. The Games' opening ceremony is on Friday night.
The New Zealand team's chef de mission, Dave Currie, said the Games village and sporting facilities were all superb. Beijing's air pollution was nothing like the issue it had been built up to be in the international media.
"It's not a pollutant. When you breathe, you don't get a sore throat ... now there's only cars on the road every second day, there must have been 1000 building sites closed down, and they have closed down the worst polluting factories."
