With more than 100 athletes and officials heading to Dominican Republic for the Central American and Caribbean Games, Bermuda has sent its biggest squad to a major event.

The scale of the task facing chef de mission Jon Beard has been immense and all-consuming, especially in the final few months leading up to the Games in Santo Domingo.

Speaking to The Royal Gazette just a couple of days before the opening ceremony, Beard says he is honoured to have been in charge of the logistics to ensure every athlete makes it to the start line with minimal disruption.

“Leading up to it you always are busy, and of course we're very fortunate with the BOA office,” Beard said.

“Branwen Smith-King and Trina Roberts have kept everything going for us, but I’m constantly contacting the team managers, dealing with their concerns and issues, checking in on the different events to make sure that nothing has changed. Then there's all the uniform requirements that everybody's got to adhere to and then of course making sure everybody’s registered correctly for the appropriate sport.

“We had the final meeting of registration yesterday and in one of our teams somebody had been injured and we had to move them at the last minute. We were probably in that meeting for about an hour and a half and I apologised to the organisers for taking up so much of their time. They told me not to worry as they had spent seven hours with Mexico delegation registering their 700 athletes.”

Beard has been working on logistics for about a year when he first visited the Dominican Republic and the venues were still very much works in progress.

“It’s been a year of work because I came to the venue meeting last March but the venues weren’t finished — they still had logistics to look at — and so we’ve been building on that ever since,” he said.

“In the last two to three months it's taken up a good part of my daily time, just because things change slightly and you want to make sure that it's right for the athletes and the coaches. The Commonwealth Games and the CAC Games are happening at the same time, so there's been a lot of work. Some of the athletes are used to coming into these multi-sport Games, but some are only used to their own sport being played, so it’s all new for them and it’s certainly been time-consuming.”

Complicating matters further was the compressed window for finalising rosters, with confirmation of eligibility for some athletes only arriving in recent weeks — including for those coming to Santo Domingo directly off the back of the Commonwealth Games.

“The actual deadline for being accepted is only fairly recently for swimming, athletics, and tennis,” Beard said.

“It was only recently that we realised swimmers had qualified for both games and are going to fly from there down to here. It’s great to see the level of athletes that we have and their commitment to what's happening.”

With Bermuda's contingent competing across an unusually broad spread of sports and venues, and the Games unfolding over more than two weeks rather than the single-week window of events such as the Island Games, Beard said the challenge of simply being present for the athletes has required careful co-ordination with his assistant chef de mission, Trina Roberts.

“There is the opportunity for me to get to see everybody who’s competing at some stage and I’m very fortunate Trina Roberts is here assisting me as the assistant chef de mission — she's super organised,” Beard said.

“So between us, if somebody has to be here to meet people coming in on flights, one of us can be here, the other one can be going out checking that everything’s all right with the athletes. I think we're going to be in good shape, and I think we're both going to get the chance to see some top-class sport, and I’m looking forward to that side of it.”

Despite the workload, Beard insists he thrives on the chaos of Games time, comparing the dining hall's rapid scaling — from a few hundred diners to an eventual few thousand — as just one more puzzle to be solved.

“I quite enjoy these situations because there's constant challenges and you just have to find your way through it, so perhaps I'm some sort of masochist,” he said.

“Things like the dining room — it looks fantastic, the food choices are terrific, but right now there’s about 200 to 300 people, and by the middle of next week there is going to be 2,000 to 3,000 people all needing to be fed.

“So right now you can go, ‘Oh, this looks good’, and it is and the people are lovely, so I'm sure we'll get there. I don't think it’ll go without a few headaches, but I think generally this will be something we can all look back on as being a great time.”

With Bermuda's largest team starting to settle into their surroundings, Beard said his focus turns to supporting every competitor, while allowing himself to hope that a medal or two might come Bermuda's way before the Games close on August 8.

“I think we just need to be supporting all of our athletes because to be competing at this level is phenomenal,” he said.

“To have this number of people competing from such a small island is just brilliant.”