London 2012

Anyone who knows me will know that I am not a great sports enthusiast. Sport is OK and good for one’s health (if done in moderation) but watching other people compete seldom does it for me. I am also immensely bored with the amount of coverage in the media.

You may have heard that London gets to host the Olympic Games this time around. This is not really the place to go into the rights and wrongs of spending billions on a couple of weeks running, jumping and standing still, let alone, the whole issue of justifying it by the legacy it will leave, and using the games as an excuse to ‘rejuvenate’ the East End (ask the people who used to live there and were shipped out to Essex or Siberia or wherever), and all the other fuss and nonsense – so I won’t. [You did. Ed]

But it does seem unfair that the Olympics have copyrighted the phrase ‘London 2012’. How can you copyright the place and date? Nonetheless that is what they have done so this blog entry’s title is in breach of LOCOG copyright – and proud of it.

I was in London at the beginning of February and among other things I visited the Stratford Olympic Park, part of which looked like this:

From left: McDonalds, the Orbit, main stadium, blocks of flats overlooking
the site, power plant chimney stack, park management offices.

The main stadium will seat umptillion people, and then they will take out the top level of seating to leave the lower level for the audiences who are expected to attend the venue in it's legacy role.

Stadium kit with removable non-legacy seating

They have had some test events to make sure every thing works. This is a very sensible thing to do. During one such event they discovered that BMXers were gettign blown off their bikes on one of the ramps and have redesigned the layout. The layout of ramps with regard to prevailing weather conditions is reasonably unpredictable and it is good to have an opportunity to test it before the serious business of competition kicks off.

On the other hands they had a little bit of trouble in the indoor venues. "We did have some feedback from spectators that they couldn’t understand what our announcers were saying. So we upgraded the PA systems across all of our venues. In the indoor events that we’ve had, [the venues] were built for what they are going to be in legacy, so we hadn’t got the PA systems that we need."

The need for an audible PA system is entirely predictable. The idea that they had fitted the legacy system in one venue is unfortunate and should not have happened. The idea that they had fitted inappropriate PA systems in all the venues is laughable. That's a shit excuse and looks like someone really screwed up. Lucky it was only feedback from the spectators.

Getting in was reminiscent of entering east Berlin before the wall came down, what with the concrete bunker style vehicle entrance and security staff checking the underside of vehicles with mirrors on sticks. I didn’t see any machine gun posts but I expect there are some.

The pedestrian entrances are full height turnstiles with biometric ID scanners cunningly disguised as hand dryers.

The park is home to the worlds largest McDonalds, an appropriate category of food, associated as it is with fitness, wellbeing and sporting prowess the world over (discuss).