A Londoner Looks Back: Were The Olympics Awesome?

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The other evening I walked out of London’s Olympicstadium onto the new “Javelin” train into town. (The journey from east tocentral London, quite recently still something of a commuter’s nightmare, took justsix minutes.) A railway worker on the platform didn’t just point everyone the wayonto the train; he did a dance for us. You don’t usually get that on Londontransport. These Olympics made the city happier.I now live in Paris, but Iconsider myself a Londoner. I went to nursery school in London, spent 15 years of my lifein the city, speak in a London accent, visit my parents and siblings here, and, as someoneof mongrel origin who belongs nowhere, I feel at home in the world’s mostcosmopolitan city. To steal a line from the 1980s film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid:“I’m not English. I’m a Londoner.” But London is also a sprawling,gray, wet, overpriced city where traveling anywhere always seems to take forever, andLondoners are not positive people. In fact, we are whiners. Going into theOlympics, the whining was at full blast. Landing in London days before the Gamesbegan, I found my friends and family full of dread. The Games’ organizers hadindicated that while the Olympics were on, traveling anywhere would take even longer thanforever. My sister had been told to be at her desk at 7 a.m. during the Games to avoid therush hour -- this in a city where many people start work nearer to 10 a.m. A friend showedme a kind of war scenario prepared by the bank where he worked, full of ominous questionslike, “What if your supply chain stopped?” “What if your technologyfailed?” “What if your brand, image and reputation were impacted by any of theabove?” And what was all this upheaval in aid of? To watch some doped-upmoustachioed Eastern European women win incomprehensible weightlifting events? In a YouGovsurvey days before the opening ceremony, only 51% of Britons expressed an interest in theOlympics -- and that was a lot better than earlier surveys.On the day of theopening ceremony I happened to have a meeting down the street from my last London address (a shared flat above a now defunctliquor store). I ran to Baker Street tube, as I’d done a thousand times before. ThenI got on a media bus to the opening ceremony that passed Southwark Bridge with theFinancial Times building where I had worked in the 1990s. It was like a dream:You move through a familiar landscape that has been transformed. The Olympics helped mesee London afresh.It was during the opening ceremony that the mood amongLondoners changed. I know foreigners didn’t get all the references: the Windrushship that brought the first Jamaican immigrants to Britain in 1948, the BBC weatherforecaster Michael Fish assuring us there would be no hurricane the night before onestruck in 1987, the dance of the state-funded National Health Service nurses. But Londoners got it. Danny Boyle, the director, gave us a multicultural and funnyBritain that had finally shed its imperial delusions of grandeur. The Olympic torch wasrun into the stadium not by an Aryan superman but by the pot-bellied middle-aged ex-rowerSteve Redgrave, who can’t run. For the first time in my life, Boyle’s Britainmade me feel a patriot. The opening ceremony remains the highlight of my Olympics.Then the sports began, and with it the instinctive expectation that the Britswould fall flat on their faces. We may have invented modern sports, but England’ssoccer team hasn’t won a prize since 1966, and no British man has won Wimbledonsince 1936. Surely our Olympians would continue the tradition? It seemedso on the first day, when Britain’s much-hyped male cyclists failed to win a medalor even to figure in the run-in in front of Buckingham Palace. Only on the second day didour first medal arrive: A silver for cyclist Lizzie Armitstead, a polite young vegetarianfrom the rural north so little-known that at the press conference she had to introduceherself to the nation. “I could never get my head around eating corpses,” sheexplained. On the fourth morning, Britain still had no golds. The moreexcitable newspapers began demanding inquests. And then the golds came in a crazy rush,won by a bunch of underpaid Britons of all colors whose frank delight was irresistible.Above all, there was Mo Farah, the Somali-born runner, who had arrived in London’ssuburbs as an eight-year-old barely able to speak English, and had really wanted to playon the wing for Arsenal, but who won gold in the 10,000 and 5,000 meters instead. Afterhis first gold, an African journalist asked if he wouldn’t rather have been runningfor Somalia. “Look, mate, this is my country,” replied Farah. He wasBoyle’s multicultural Britain. The second Saturday of the Olympics, whenFarah was among six Britons to win gold, was Britain’s best sporting day since 1966.It was our best single Olympic day since the Games were held in London in 1908. Of course,we embarked on an orgy of patriotism. On BBC TV, the new “British heroes” werefeted much like “heroes of the harvest” on North Korean state TV. Foreignersrightly accused the Britons of practically ignoring the other 200 nations. However,that’s what every country at the Olympics does. Each country watches its own Games. Continue Reading

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