How I Spent My (Olympic) Summer Vacation
By Edwin Davies
August 15, 2012
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.
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