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Rio de Janeiro • Hopefully I didn't spoil myself. I probably did.

For all the beauty and grandeur Rio de Janeiro has to offer, I think it will be hard to top my first official day of covering an Olympics. Blame Copacabana beach. Blame the beach volleyball arena featuring a press row with an unmatchable view. The Atlantic Ocean's breaks seen both to the left and the right of the Olympic Rings stationed dead-center in the arena broke harder as the day wore on. The waves, filled with some body surfers, crashed harder, too.

My Olympic introduction was smooth sailing Saturday. The two hours it took to get from the Barra village to the streets of Copacabana was time-consuming, but not arduous. Every working media shuttle has high-speed wifi. I filed a story on a bus with reclining chairs and TV sets. It carried all of four media members, me included.

The ride looped around Rio, offering some of the same views I saw when I landed here Wednesday morning. What was more detailed this time around was the favelas. They're far away from these main roads, but close enough that what's before you leaves you awestruck, and does so for a while. After disappearing into an elongated tunnel, we came out to a scene of four adjacent soccer fields. It was early afternoon and hot then — every pitch was packed with what looked to be 11-on-11 matches.

Soccer and Brazil correspond. Beach volleyball is up there, too. An hour before Utah's beach volleyball duo Jake Gibb and Casey Patterson were to start their Olympic medal quest, I walked up the maze of stairs beneath the arena to the press area. The Brazilian female tandem of Agatha and Barbara — Brazilians do the first-name thing — fell behind the first set to a Czech Republic team.

The stadium was filled with yellow. Many wore Brazilian national team jerseys. Some just had a yellow T-shirt on. And the place rocked as Agatha and Barbara roared back to win in three sets. As fans willed their beach volleyball players to a win, they danced for however long possible to the short clips of hip hop or reggae that boomed. The party was finally on.

After Gibb and Patterson won, Patterson spoke of the vibe here in Rio.

"You show a little bit of your love and passion and a little bit of dancing and you can turn them into some fans for you," he said. "For me, I've played with so many Brazilians growing up in indoor and internationally, that was very contagious for me their style and I embrace their style and try to emulate it in my style. I love it here."

For all the doom-and-gloom before the world arrived this week, Patterson said he never had any issues during his previous visits to Brazil. And he's been here a lot: Rio three times, Sao Paulo a couple of times, plus Brasilia and Vitoria.

Said the Southern California native, "I always see it as being an exciting and special place to go to. I wouldn't go walking around Compton at midnight, so it's the same thing as here. Big cities are dangerous when you [to] go the wrong places. That's the same thing as it is here. You embrace and love the culture, and everything's fine."

That's the spirit.

Chris Kamrani

Twitter: @chriskamrani