Categories
Other

Final Olympic round-up

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 frilly dress trailing down behind her. And while Led Zep isn’t my kind of music — or indeed remotely contemporary, by pop standards — it did just about manage to cut through the slightly oppressive grandiosity of the Chinese ceremony. So I’ll give it a solid 6½/10. For the London opening ceremony they need to bring that up to at least 8½, but for the time being I can live with that.

Usain Bolt on Flickr, used under a CC by-sa licence.

My sporting highlight of the games was Usain Bolt. No points for originality there. I know I said the other day that the sprint events were overrated, but for once they really lived up the hype. Watching someone beat the field by such a large margin and apparently so easily was almost surreal. It just shouldn’t be possible to do that.

I suppose I ought to name-check Michael Phelps, although as all his races were on in the middle of the night, I never really engaged with his story in the same way. Is he now The Greatest Olympian Ever? Well, I suppose he might be. It’s not that he won 8 medals in Beijing: sure, that’s incredible, but I still think the greatest individual achievement at a single Games was Emil Zátopek winning the 5000m, 10000m and marathon in 1952. But if you add the five golds from Athens, Phelps has completely dominated the swimming at two Olympics now, and that might be enough to secure his place as The Greatest. Apparently he’s planning to compete in 2012: if he could come to London and win another three or four golds, that really would put him in a class of his own.

Speaking of Zatopek: OMG, the Ethiopians in the long-distance running. To have Tirunesh Dibaba and Kenenisa Bekele both manage the 5000/10000 double was amazing. And particularly the women’s 10k and the men’s 5k; to see them sprint so easily away from the rest of the field at the end of a very fast-run race was almost as impressive in its way as Usain Bolt in the sprints. Bekele ran the last mile in under four minutes; I know the four-minute mile isn’t a big deal any more to a professional athlete, but to run one at the end of a fast 5000m… lawks.

And there’s Britain coming in fourth place on the medals table. Fourth! In Atlanta we came 36th. So three cheers for Christine Ohuruogu, Rebecca Adlington, Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins, Rebecca Romero, Nicole Cooke, and all the other medal winners whose names don’t spring to mind.

» photo credit: Beijing Olympics: Usain Bolt Breaks The World Record (Men’s 100 Meters) by Richard Giles, used under a Creative Commons by-sa licence.

Categories
Culture

Opening ceremony debrief

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 terms of sheer scale and organised manpower. The Chinese put on a world class display of making-patterns-out-of-groups-of-people. So I hope we don’t even try to compete with that.

On the other hand I didn’t actually enjoy it that much. The two best bits were the spectacular opening with the massed ranks of glowing drums, and the lighting of the flame, which was a great touch of theatre. Most of the rest of it, impressive as it was, seemed a bit forgettable.

And these ceremonies always seem a bit ponderous. I appreciate that it’s physically difficult to make these huge-scale things happen quickly, and that given the amount of time and money that has gone into them they want to do them justice, but it would be great to see someone do an opening ceremony that really rattled along. Instead of an hour-long show with a great effect every four minutes, I want to see a half-hour show with a wow moment every thirty seconds. Like a finely-honed theatrical performance: if you went to the theatre to see a non-verbal performance, a dance/clowning/physical comedy type show, you would expect something to be happening all the time. I would love to see an opening ceremony that had that kind of pace to it. How do you do that for a whole stadium full of people? I don’t know.

In fact the whole ceremony could usefully be done more quickly. It’s hard to see how you could speed up the parade of the athletes, short of having them come in both ends of the stadium at once, but all the ceremony at the end — the speeches, the taking of the oaths of the athletes and judges, the carrying of the Olympic flag into the stadium, the Olympic hymn — if you could find ways to make that happen faster, without breaking with tradition too much, it would be a vast improvement. Perhaps they could carry in the Olympic flag while the speeches are going on, for example. The one part of that whole rigmarole which is a great moment is the entry of the Olympic flame; most of the rest of it is dull.

I would love the London opening ceremony to aim for exciting and fun, rather than impressive and grand. And not just because any attempt to do grand is going to look second rate compared to Beijing. London is a city of theatres: let’s put on a show. Something creative, surprising, and above all dynamic.

» Photo credit: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images. Taken from the official website.

Categories
Culture Other

London 2012 logo reactions

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 the past 15 years: Euro ’96 and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. From an organisational point of view, both were a great success. But the opening ceremonies were cheesy, incoherent, unimaginative, clichéd. Half-baked. Second-rate. And my worry was that not just the opening ceremony, but the whole style, everything that the world will remember about the London Olympics other than the sport, might end up the same way: naff and a bit amateurish.

DSC03132, originally uploaded by Dean Morris.

There are plenty of people in the UK who know how to put on a show, whether it’s an exhibition, a rock concert, a West End musical or a royal funeral. For that matter, the fabulous opening ceremony for the Athens Olympics was done by a British company. But none of that creativity seems to survive contact with the government. Whether politicians just have bad taste, or it’s the clammy hand of design by committee that ruins everything, I don’t know, but the record doesn’t inspire much optimism. The ultimate example is the Millennium Dome. It was always an event in search of a reason for existing, and the cost of the thing wasn’t exactly going to endear it to anyone, but much of that would have been forgiven if the experience of visiting it had been exciting and stimulating. Or glamorous, or awe-inspiring, or shocking, or moving. Instead, it was overwhelmingly mediocre. I had a pleasant enough day out there with my family, but it was completely unwowful and unmemorable.

I was cautiously optimistic about London 2012, though. The team seemed to be very focussed and professional, the bid logo was certainly the best of the competing cities, and the videos for the bid presentation in Singapore were very polished and even quite witty. And beach volleyball on Horseguards Parade, where the PM will be able to watch it from the windows of 10 Downing Street, is a stroke of genius. So I had a sense of shock and a feeling that all my worst fears had come true when I saw that the new logo is, basically, ugly:

London 2012 logo

Not only is it garish and lopsided, it looks so dated. And not generically old-fashioned, but quite specifically dated. My immediate associations were Max Headroom and the original Channel 4 logo; other people have mentioned Smash Hits, the video for Money For Nothing, MTV, and the titles for Saved By The Bell. In other words, there’s an immediate association with the cheesier end of 80s yoof culture.

Now I have a certain nostalgic fondness for the 80s, and I know the decade is quite trendy at the moment, but it seems a bizarre note to strike for the 2012 Olympics. And what worries me even more than the retina-scarring gaudiness of it is that note of cheesiness. The Olympics is never going to be cutting-edge and hipper-than-thou; it’s too big, too old, and too establishment for that. But it should be possible to do it with a bit of panache.

Well, I’ve been reading some of the commentary on design blogs—there’s a couple [1, 2] among the daily links in the previous post—and although everyone seems to have the same initial reaction of startled revulsion, some people have, after a little thought, offered some defences of the design. There seem to be three basic points:

1) Technically speaking, it’s a very flexible design. It scales well, it works well in black and white and a variety of colour schemes, and it will work not just in print and on screen but on baseball caps, polystyrene cups and just about any other medium. Which wouldn’t make up for any of its other failings, but is worth noting.

2) At least it doesn’t include a picture of Big Ben. More broadly: Olympic logos are generally forgettable, clichéd and bland. This one is surprising, striking, and, presumably, memorable. It has had an immediate impact, and although that initial impact has been negative, it is at least a strong reaction. And people will get used to the design in time. Possibly.

3) Most interestingly: it’s not just a logo. Because it is so visually striking, it sets up a visual signature which will be able to be carried through into all kinds of materials: TV ads, posters, banners, volunteer uniforms and so on. It really is, as the committee stressed, a brand rather than a logo.

These arguments have not quite won me over. ‘At least it’s not bland’ is a bit too much like saying ‘don’t you see? It’s ugly on purpose.’ Which just might be so clever it loops round to stupid again. And while I can see the virtues of a coherent visual style for the Games, the idea of the whole of London being plastered with lurid jaggedy shapes for the next seven years doesn’t fill me with an overwhelming sense of joy.

But at least it’s given me something to think about and a sense that, just possibly, there’s some method to the madness. Perhaps they know what they’re doing, perhaps it’ll all be OK; perhaps we won’t be looking back at the Games in 20 years time with a visceral cringe of embarrassment.

Categories
Other

London sports day

A free idea for the people at London 2012 to engage with the public and generate positive vibes: a London sports day, held somewhere like Hyde Park. Invite people from all London’s community groups (schools, churches, mosques, clubs and societies; as broad a range as possible) to take part in a big day-long jamboree of sport. The idea would be to try and create an atmosphere somewhere between a school sports day and a country fair, with candy-floss and ice-cream and toffee apples. In fact, if you could get people from London’s many ethnic communities to organise all kinds of different street food, so much the better.

There should be some proper events, but also lots of events like egg-and-spoon, three-legged races, sack races, wheelbarrow races, throwing the cricket ball, wellie wanging, keepy-uppy, a greasy pole, standing long jump, London skittles, tug-of-war, barrel-rolling and so on. Have lots of events going on at the same time so people can wander from one to another. And you should get exactly the same kind of medal for winning the silly events as the serious ones. Or you could have serious events but keep it informal; have an all-comers 100m competition, where anyone who turns up on the day and puts their name down (or as many as they have time for) can compete. If you processed them quickly enough – say heats at five minute intervals, with only the outright winner going through to the next round – you could get through a lot of entrants in a day*. It would be important to have events for both adults and children, but not silly events for children and proper ones for adults; we want to see Seb Coe doing a sack race.

It might also be fun to have Olympians doing demonstration events like archery and judo, but the focus should be on participation by ordinary Londoners. The point would be to celebrate sport for the sheer fun of it and its potential as an inclusive community event. Not too much hard sell about why the Olympics is going to be a good thing; just try to make sure everyone has a great time and that the London 2012 logo is visible on all the leaflets and stands.

*actually, doing the maths suggests this might not be practical. hey-ho. You might be able to do something like an all-comers discus; everyone can queue up to get one throw, the longest over the course of the day wins.

Categories
Other

Hurray for the London Olympics!

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 hijacked the news agenda.

It was always going to cost more than predicted — it’s a big capital project run by policitians. That’s what happens. And it was always inevitable that there would be a lot of whining from dismal killjoys. But the enthusiast, pro-Olympic side of the argument lost all its momentum just as it should have been drawing people in, and so we’re going to have the six years of gloomy pronostication without having had the chance to enjoy the initial moment.

Categories
Other

Dover’s Cotswold Olimpick Games

Fittingly, 2012 will be the 400th anniverary of the Olimpick Games held in Chipping Camden every year, featuring events like ‘Throwing the Sledgehammer’ and ‘Shin-kicking’. Not to be confused with the Olympian Games in Much Wenlock in Shropshire, which, famously, gave Baron de Coubertin the idea.