End of the Olympics

So that’s it, no more Olympics for another four years. The games are over, it was the closing ceremony last night and we’ll all have to find something else to talk about.

I have to say that the games have been splendid and have made everyone, except the Scottish Nationalists, proud to be British. I even feel a little grumpy about having complained that my routes into work were disrupted. I haven’t taken a bicycle from King’s Cross to Victoria for a couple of months, since they closed the Mall and Horse Guards Road and made me cycle through Parliament Square to get to work.

When London was awarded the Olympics and it was announced that beach volleyball would be held at Horse Guards I thought that would be quite nice - I could have a look at it as I went past. What an idiot! You couldn’t get within half a mile of it, let alone have a glimpse of the court. It has been interesting to see the Olympic park in Stratford gradually develop. Tom and Hannah were living in Bow for three years during the building work, so when we went to see them we’d drive down the A12 alongside the park and you could see it all taking shape.

It’s funny, but as soon as we won the Olympics, the bad news started and it didn’t seem to stop until the opening ceremony took place. The day after the euphoria of London being selected, muslim extremists blew up three tube trains and a bus in suicide bomb attacks, killing more than 50 people and injuring far more. A fortnight later, another four attacks took place, but the bombs failed to detonate; then police shot dead some poor Brazilian who had been mistaken for a bomber.

We also had the predictable cost escalation. The government had forgotten to include VAT in its cost calculations - that added 18 per cent to the costs at a stroke. We were ready to read the stories about building delays and the last-minute scramble to get it all finished, but that didn’t happen.

Terrorism was a major threat (or fear) and there have been lots of arrests since the bombings, rows about radical clerics preaching hate and periodic bomb scares. For the Olympics, concern about some kind of 9/11 style attack where airliners were hijacked and flown into buildings, led to a squadron of interceptor jets kept on alert, warships anchored in the Thames and, most controversially, batteries of surface-to-air missles sited on the top of tower blocks near to the Olympic park.

Travel disruption was a major concern, with so many people in London, but as it happened, all the dire warnings worried people so much that London was like a Sunday morning most days, with my train and tube journey being much quieter than usual. The tube unions, never slow to strike or grab some more cash, managed to extort massive bonuses for working normally and when the bus drivers tried to do the same, there were bus strikes across the capital.

People complained that they weren’t able to get tickets. I didn’t try because the whole process seemed a nightmare; people complained about the price of tickets; people complained because West Ham was going to take over the Olympic stadium and it would become a football ground, then Spurs and Leyton Orient complained because they claim West Ham had been given special treatment and they also wanted to take over the stadium.

The Cafe Olympic (sorry - Cafe Lympic )

Finally, in the run up to the opening of the Games, there were complaints about the extent of corporate sponsorship, unfair restrictions on visitors and crazy rules being applied. The Cafe Olympic in Stratford, which has been there for 20 years (long before anyone thought of staging the Olympics there) was threatened with legal action because the word “Olympic” was a trademark. The owner just shrugged and changed the name to the Lympic cafe by painting out the O. You couldn’t take food or drink into the Olympic park for security reasons (sandwich bombs) which meant people had to eat McDonalds (one of the big corporate sponsors) and pay £3 for a bottle of water. The fact that they’ve been doing that kind of thing at football and cricket for years should have meant none of this was a surprise ...

There was some trepidation about the opening ceremony. Would we put on a decent show? Would we match the Chinese who had staged the biggest firework display in history four years ago for the opening of the Beijing games? Fears were not calmed when organisers said we were not going to try to compete with China, we had a much smaller budget and the show would be uniquely British.

Word got out that the show would include, ducks, sheep and sheepdogs and fears intensified.

On the night, it was a triumph. The show was organised by film-maker Danny Boyle and the effects were the best theatrical tricks. The stadium included a mini Glastonbury Tor, scenes of rural idyll with sheep, geese, happy villagers, football and cricket. Then there was the industrial revolution with the scene transformed with factory chimneys and forges. A massive Olympic ring was cast  apparently from molten steel and rose into the air to form one of five Olympic rings hanging over the stadium.

There was the story of the River Thames from its source to London, David Beckham bringing the torch and Olympic flame from Tower Bridge to Straford via speedboat and a celebration of all things British - from the National Health Service to children’s literature. The big question was who would light the flame in the stadium and when Beckham handed over the torch to Steve Redgrave (a rower who has won five gold medals), it seemed we had our answer. In fact Redgrave lit other torches, which went to Olympic medal winners, who handed them on to young athletes that were helping to mentor and they lit individual stems on a torch made up of multiple burners - one for each country taking part. The pipes and burners were laid flat on the floor, but when lit, they rose and came together (like a flower closing). It was very clever and very beautiful.

Mary Poppins descend into the area - part of
the celebration of children's literature.

The Olympic torch closed up

Everyone thought they’d done a brilliant job with the opening ceremony and all the negativity around the games seemed to disappear. There was nothing but good news stories (apart from getting the North and South Korea flags mixed up and sparking a diplomatic row, some idiot arrested for abusing diver Tom Daley on Twitter and some drunken yob throwing a bottle onto the track as the 100m final started. Fortunately it was behind the starting line and it didn’t interfere with the final. The chap who threw it was standing next to a Dutch judo competitor and got a chop on the back of the neck for his trouble.

The Olympics are a massive TV experience and the BBC did a really good job. The TV crew outnumbered the athletes on the British team and there were over 20 dedicated Olympic channels. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to spend much time watching TV, so I thought it best to record a couple of highlights shows late each night and watch those the following day. My Olympics would be a +24 event. Actually, it hasn’t quite worked out like that because I still have 11 shows unwatched, so my Olympics will probably carry on until the end of September.

It was a really successful event for British athletes with 29 gold medals and third place in the medal table behind USA and China. The performance I enjoyed most was Bradley Wiggins (who had become the first Briton to win the Tour de France a week earlier) winning gold in the time trial. Mo Farah did a 10K/5K double and will be a hot favourite for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. He’s got a terrific story, having come to England as a young boy seeking asylum from war in Somalia.

The Olympics have dominated the news agenda and I felt most sorry for a 12-year-old girl, who went missing on the Monday of the second week. She was from south London, near Croydon, and normally the story would have been headline news. It barely made page 10 and police finally found her body at her grandmother’s house almost a week later and arrested her grandmother’s 37-year-old boyfriend. He’s in court today and at least that gives the news media an opportunity to get back into negative mode. Police have already been criticised for not performing a proper investigation (probably because they were all at Stratford) and for twice searching granny’s pad (including sniffer dogs) and not finding the body. It seems they didn’t think of looking in the loft!