Olympics in Milan: The RARE LOOK inside Canon's room full of loaner equipment!

Every two years, when I am lucky enough to find myself at the Olympic Games, people beg me to get myself behind the walls of Canon to see ALL the goodies that they have brought to the Games as loaners. Once again, after enough pleading, Canon was nice enough to bring me behind the closed doors to see all the amazing loaner gear that they have here. 

Remember, unlike the Summer Olympics and previous Winter Games, there is not one big media center for the whole event. For this reason, there is one main center in Milan and 3 medium sized centers spread out in Italy. What you are about to see in this "tour" is not all the gear since Canon Professional Services (CPS) has 4 different locations (Milan, Cortina, Levigno, and Tesero) at these Olympics. Since I am based in Milan, I got to visit the CPS area within the Main Press Center (MPC) here in the city. It must have been a logistical nightmare for them (and the other camera companies), trying to figure out what gear to provide and determining the proper staff levels at each location.

Even with that in mind, and the fact that a lot of equipment is currently loaned out to photographers, Canon had more equipment back there than I expected.

Let's get on with the tour...

The first thing I noticed was all the big lenses that they had with them. You can see all these RF 800mm lenses lined up. At $19,000 per lens, that is a lot of money sitting there! Heck, this is like looking at a fleet of cars lined up here.

I was told that the container below had even more of these big boys. 

They had a whole bunch of the newer RF 100-300mm lenses ready to loan. I wish I had known that they would have this many, as I wouldn't have brought my personal one with me. :)

They had a plethora of RF 400mm f/2.8 lenses at the ready.

Needless to say, they had plenty of camera batteries for the Canon R1 and R3 cameras...

...and plenty more for the Canon R5 and R6 models.

I saw all these batteries charging on a wall and thought "I need a wall like this at my place!"

I took out the new Canon RF 7-14mm fisheye lens and took a wide shot of this dream wall.

There is so much amazing gear here! I wanted to get a wide shot of this equipment rack without the fisheye distortion and saw that they had one of the new RF 14mm lenses in the room. I asked if I could use that lens for some photos. All the following photos were taken with that lens.

I have been using two of the Canon R1 cameras here at the Games and feel lucky to have them. Then I saw ALL these R1 cameras in one place and was blown away. This would be my ultimate candy store!

They had Canon R1, R3, R5 MKII, R6 MKII, R6 MKIII and even older 1DX MKIII cameras there. I asked why they had the old stuff, and they said they want to be prepared to loan that equipment to anyone who is using this gear and familiar with it. That makes sense, although I don't think I have seen anyone here not using the new mirrorless camera bodies. You will also see a whole bunch of other L Series lenses. Everything from the RF 24-70mm, RF 24-105mm, RF 70-200mm, RF 100-500mm and more. I looked to see if there were any unannounced goodies back there but did not see anything.

I saw these older EF lenses and was told that they had them for the same reason they had the older camera models.

Here are more of the wider L Series lenses.

Can you imagine how much money is sitting in this room? It must be millions of dollars of cameras and lenses, with most of the value in the endless expensive lenses.

They did have a repair team working on cameras and lenses behind this area, but I was not allowed to photograph that area. That was fine with me, because I was able to capture all the mouthwatering camera gear to show all of you.

Please excuse any typos. Normally I try to proofread everything before I post, but here at the Olympics, time is a commodity. I definitely miss some things. :)

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