After
years of build up and 17 sport-filled days the world's athletes are
on their way home, and the 2012 London Olympics are over. I must
confess to feeling a twinge of sadness, which has entirely caught me
by surprise, because like many people I started out as a cynic. For a
long time I felt no connection with the games, they were just an
event I had nothing to do with, going on in another part of
town. Also, with all the money spent on them, the gloomy economic
situation, and the typically British pre-event media pessimism, I expected
a spectacular cock-up or at the very least to be extremely bored.
Then, I sat down to watch the opening ceremony and cynicism died and
I became a believer.
I
hurried back from the pub with a group of friends to catch the
opening ceremony. I think we were expecting nothing more than a
slightly scaled up school disco, with some coloured lights and a
couple of the sort of fireworks you could find in the back of a
corner shop; nothing to compete with the growing financial muscle of
China. Salute to Mr Boyle though, he amazed the world and exceeded
all expectations, leading to a scene where a group of lads in their
20s gathered in our living room cheering Mr Bean, the Queen's skydiving skills, and the good old NHS. It was beautiful.
From
then I felt the stirrings of pride in London, the city I grew up in
and have lived for most of my life, and an eagerness to watch as much of the games as possible, best
expressed as the thought "Might as well, its the Olympics".
If
nothing else, the Olympics are an opportunity to watch sports that
never usually would get the time of day on mainstream channels.
Handball, water polo, archery, fencing, the list goes on. I tried to
dip in and out to see what was going on in different parts of the
games and really experience it all. Luckily, the BBC's coverage was formidably comprehensive, with all of its channels including BBC Three
and Four putting in overtime. Most of my watching however was done
through the amazingly efficient BBC Olympic schedule website. A
website laid out for users to choose any sport to watch live, or to
catch up if you missed things, that marked each stream with
highlights so you could rewind and find them easily; this brought it home to me that we are truly living in the future. Much
congratulations to the BBC; this is why it needs to be defended at
all costs, so we don't end up with an #NBCfail situation where we
have advert breaks in the middle of events and broadcasters making us
wait till primetime to see things, instead of watching live.
I
also have to comment on the 100m final, aka the most electric 9.63
seconds I can remember. It is amazing how much you can enjoy
something that is just so basic and natural as running; enjoying seeing a
person go as fast as they can is just human nature, even from
childhood seeing who can run fastest in the playground or down the
street. Watching the race was my undoubted sporting highlight of the
games, with all the anticipation, the absolute silence in the stadium
before the starting gun, and then seeing the athletes powering up and
going, with Usain Bolt pulling away in the end. Amazing.
So
that was the Olympics. I was so proud; seeing how excited everyone
was about which big events were scheduled each day, seeing Buckingham
Palace and Hyde Park and Big Ben and countless other historic landmarks as the backdrop of events, reading media reports
by journalists from other countries on how welcoming the city and the
country were and how impressed they were. The only dip was probably the closing ceremony, although could it ever have lived up to our newly raised expectations? Besides, getting absolutely everything perfect is not the British way. Regardless; well done London, you did it.
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