How I Spent My (Olympic) Summer Vacation
By Edwin Davies
August 15, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I did not watch the Opening Ceremonies of the 30th Olympiad. On the night that the Games began, I opted to go out to a club night being run by one of my friends, mainly to support them and to have a good time with other friends, but also because, as of the 27th of July, 2012, I had relatively little interest in the Olympics themselves. Even though Great Britain, my beloved homeland, hosting the Games was a genuinely once in a lifetime experience, there had been such doubts about them in the lead up that many Britons regarded them the sort of weary cynicism typical of our natural character: Where others may hope for the best, we prepare for the worst.
I visited London twice in the months leading up to the start of the Games, once in May and once the week before they started, and both times I was struck by the misgivings that many people had about the oncoming onslaught of sport. Riding a bike around the Olympic Park, I could see everywhere the hectic, hurried preparations being undertaken to make the city ready to play host to the world which, coupled with the relentless pessimism of the press, made it seem like the best we could look forward to was for the Games to be merely a minor disaster. Friends who lived in London told me of the inconveniences that the Games and their accompanying preparations were causing, the way in which rents across the city were skyrocketing as landlords took advantage of the expected influx of people, and there were numerous reports on the “social cleansing” being undertaken to force poorer families out of London in order to make way for the Games. As they loomed ever closer, there was much to be worried about, and there was a more than healthy amount of cynicism regarding the Games.
Yet in the week before the Games started, things started to shift noticeably. People started to care. And not just the die-hard sports fans or the uber-patriots who ruin everything by making it all about Britannia ruling the waves, but everyone. It certainly didn’t hurt that Mitt Romney made the cardinal sin of saying something that everyone in Britain had been saying for months – that we seemed a touch unprepared – assuming that it was okay to do so, in the process uniting everyone in Britain against the outsider who would have the audacity to suggest such a thing. It even made me, for a brief moment, side with our Prime Minister, a man who I have never seen eye to eye with, when he said, "We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world, of course it's easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere." There was cautious hope that things might turn out okay, if only so that we could prove the doubters (and the self-doubters) wrong.
As I said earlier, I did not watch the Opening Ceremonies live, but I did watch them on the BBC’s On-Demand service the following day. This is important, since I can safely say that it was as I watched Danny Boyle’s bizarre, beautiful and bonkers celebration of Britain, I found myself falling in love with the Olympics. The ceremony seemed like the first true representation of Britain as I know it I had ever seen; vibrant, multi-cultural, more than a little bit goofy, covered in flying Mary Poppinses, it was everything we thought the Opening Ceremony wouldn’t be, and that made it majestic. It celebrated our culture and asked us to live up to the best that we could be as a nation and as individuals. It aimed to, as the slogan for the Games themselves said, Inspire This Generation. Maybe I just got all misty-eyed at the thought of touchstones of quintessential Britishness like Gregory’s Girl, A Matter of Life and Death and Harry Hill’s TV Burp being shown to a global audience, but there was something utterly, madly marvelous about the whole thing, and from that moment on I hoped that the Games themselves could live up to that beginning.
It turned out that they could and did. From a purely nationalistic and sporting perspective, these Games were very good to Great Britain, since we walked away with 65 medals in total, 29 of them golden in hue. It was our best performance since the 1908 Olympics, which coincidentally were also held in London, and an arguably more impressive performance than at those Games since then Britain only competed against another 21 countries, as opposed to the 203 other nations vying for Olympic glory this time around.
Yet these figures are just numbers, and they don’t convey the drama and wonder of the stories that went into the medals themselves, stories that will stick with me for the rest of my life. More than that, I’ll remember the faces of athletes so ecstatic in victory or crushed in defeat. So much of the experience of the Games for me was contained in those moments when the human and the super-human met. These people carried out amazing feats, displaying an ability that is far beyond what most of us could ever hope to attain, yet they cheered and cried all the same. It was a beautiful thing to see, and we got to see it happen day in, day out for two glorious weeks.
Beyond the joy of the athletes was the joy of the spectators. Whilst there were still stories of things going wrong with the Olympics – mainly revolving around the stupidly complex ticket ordering system which put people off buying and left many events so sparsely attended that soldiers had to be ordered in to fill vacant spaces at events across the Games – and there was still a strong vein of cynicism about the less savory aspects (the social cleansing thing, in particular, is pretty unpalatable, and will probably be even worse in Rio once they start making room amongst the favelas) for the most part, people embraced the Games and the athletes, regardless of their nationality. Twenty million people tuned in to watch Usain Bolt win Gold in the 100m sprint, roughly a third of the entire population of the country. The atmosphere of the nation, and London in particular, became different over the course of the fortnight. Everyone seemed upbeat, excited and genuinely friendly and welcoming, all of which are characteristics which aren’t generally associated with London, wonderful city though it often can be.
It was a joy that transcended most of the usual national, cultural and social boundaries, and this was especially good to see considering the disdain with which elements of the right-wing press treated elements of the Games. The Daily Mail, specifically, ran a particularly odious piece about a sequence in the Opening Ceremony in which a mixed race couple were depicted living in a well-appointed, middle-class house. They went so far as to say that, “it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up.” This sort of barely disguised hateful racism is par for the course at the Mail, so it was an extra delight to see Jessica Ennis, the daughter of a black father and a white mother and therefore someone who in the view of the Daily Mail does not exist, win Gold in the Heptathlon one week after that article was published, cheered on by thousands in the Olympic Stadium and millions across the globe.
This feeling was amplified when, on the penultimate day of the Olympics, I went to Manchester to visit friends and we decided to go and watch the last day of the athletics on a big screen that had been set up near the center of the city for that very purpose. There were a couple of key events that day, including the 400m relay, which Jamaica was expected to dominate since their team contained three or four of the fastest men who ever lived, but the one that held my interest, and that of every person in that square watching the event, was the 5,000 meters.
We were there to watch Mo Farah, who had already won Gold in the 10,000m the week before, compete for his second medal of the games. Farah emerged as one of the heroes of the games: a charming, humble and brilliant athlete who also just happened to be a devout Muslim who was born in Somalia and emigrated to Britain as a child. As I sat watching the race – then stood, as towards the end Mo made his break and won comfortably whilst seemingly the whole of Britain cheered him on – I was overwhelmed by the poignancy of so many people celebrating someone because of their prowess, regardless of any other considerations, seeming to embrace the exact same multiculturalism that is so often attacked by the press. It was a moment when Britain was truly at its best.
All of which was somewhat undone the following night when the Closing Ceremony started and proved to be everything that we feared the Opening Ceremony would be: a plodding, tedious, embarrassing celebration of some of the most annoying aspects of Britishness. Contrast the sight of Kenneth Branagh reciting Shakespeare as Isambard Kingdom Brunel whist giant smokestacks rise from the Earth itself with that of One Direction being pulled around on a stage like an act at a county fair, or Fatboy Slim waddling out of irrelevance to pretend to DJ whilst standing in a giant octopus and you can see the vast difference in quality between the way in which the Games started and the way in which they ended.
Yet even these provided a deep connection between us all because it gave us something to remorselessly mock and pull to pieces in a way that we had been pretty much unable to during the preceding two weeks of good vibes and excitement. Maybe Stephen Daldry (the creative director of the ceremony and a man who can now proudly say that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is no longer the worst thing he’s ever been involved with) actually intended for that to be the case, because he certainly did a better job uniting people through mutual derision than he could ever have hoped to do by putting on a good show.
Even at its lowest ebb, the London Olympics really seemed to bring people together in Britain, and even if the hazy afterglow of it all disappears sooner rather than later, I’ll always relish having been a part of that, in my most minor of ways.