Well, I thought the London 2012 segment of the closing ceremony was… OK.
The whole bus stop routine was underwhelming, and the presence of David Beckham seemed a bit random, but the moment when the bus opened up like a flower was a striking image, as was Leona Lewis raising up into the air with her [...]
Posts tagged with ‘Olympics’
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Final Olympic round-up
26 August 2008 – 10:19 am
A thought on the Olympics
24 August 2008 – 10:12 am
While I wait anxiously to see whether London’s contribution to the closing ceremony is horribly naff, here’s a thought: since the Games are so huge and expensive to host, perhaps the future would be to split them up between lots of different places. Embrace the technology of global communication. That way, countries that could never afford to [...]
Just as a matter of record
17 August 2008 – 6:10 pm
As of close of play today, Great Britain is third on the Olympic medal table. It’s like, it gives you a warm glow, innit.
» The advert for Olympic Cycles of Wolverhampton is from the Evanion Collection of Ephemera at the British Library.
Links
16 August 2008 – 11:00 pm
Higher, faster, yes. More meritocratic? No | Matthew Syed - Times Online
'Even some of our more intelligent commentators have convinced themselves that Sir Steve Redgrave is the greatest living Olympian for winning five successive golds in rowing, not seeming to realise that the sport is so elitist that it is virtually nonexistent across much of [...]
More Olympiana
15 August 2008 – 3:39 pm
Watching someone put on a burst of pace at the end of a fast 10000m is one of the best sights in sport. Amazing stuff from Tirunesh Dibaba.
And so much more exciting to watch than the sprinters.
The Olympic sport I’d like to see
14 August 2008 – 10:48 am
I was thinking about whether Michael Phelps is the ‘greatest Olympian of all time’, and the relative value of medals in different events. For example, the fact that it’s even possible to enter eight events at the same Games means that Phelps has a medal-collecting advantage over, say, a boxer. And the 52 gold medals [...]
Yay for Nicole Cooke!
10 August 2008 – 10:16 am
I wasn’t particularly excited about the Olympics, this year, but I just caught the last 15 or 20 minutes of the women’s road cycling race to see Nicole Cooke narrowly win our first gold medal in the middle of a downpour, and got completely caught up in it.
It’s magic. Never fails.
Opening ceremony debrief
8 August 2008 – 7:58 pm
As I’ve said before, although I’m a supporter of London hosting the Olympics, my big worry is that we will come up with a feeble, amateurish opening ceremony. So I watched the Chinese version with interest.
We knew they were keen to impress: well, consider me impressed. There is no way London is going to match that in [...]
China hoist by their own petard
6 April 2008 – 5:10 pm
BBC News:
“Thirty-five arrests have been made after clashes between pro-Tibet protesters and police as the Olympic torch made its way through London.
Of course, in the parallel world of the Chinese official news machine, the only thing interfering with the movement of the torch was a sprinkling of snow. Actually, to be fair, there is an [...]
Tibet and the Olympics
16 March 2008 – 11:42 am
It’s going to be really interesting watching the Olympics unfold. There had already been rumblings, with the protests last year in Burma and pressure over Darfur, but protests in Tibet bring it that much closer to home. And as the Olympics get closer, and more and more media attention is focussed on Beijing, the Chinese [...]
Irony of the week
16 February 2008 – 9:36 am
The Chinese government expressing their sadness and shock at the idea that anyone would be crass enough to sully the Olympic spirit with the grimy taint of a political agenda.
China, the Olympics, and antiquity diplomacy
28 September 2007 – 12:10 am
I was just watching Question Time on the BBC, and the panel were asked what ‘we’ should do about Burma. Simon Schama was on the panel, and he suggested that, if China was stubborn about blocking any action via the UN, we should have a mass boycott of the Beijing Olympics, since Burma is a [...]
London 2012 logo reactions
6 June 2007 – 2:16 pm
As regular readers probably know, I’m an enthusiastic supporter of the London Olympics. But I’ve always had my own particular private worry about them. Not transport problems or cost overruns; no, what I’ve always had a nagging worry about is the opening ceremony.
There have been two big international sporting events held in the UK in [...]
Hurray for the London Olympics!
23 November 2006 – 5:04 pm
I really feel like London was cheated out of a cheerful honeymoon period of harmless excitement between winning the bidding for the 2012 Olympics and the start of the inevitable gloomy stories about spiralling costs. Cheated because, of course, it was the morning after we won that a bunch of devout young men from Leeds [...]