Mind the Gap (and the Gold Medal)

The surprise hit of the London Games? Apparently, it is public transportation. The trendlet got off to a start last week when the Venezuelan fencer Rubén Limardo beat the Norwegian Bartosz Piasecki to win the individual épée contest. After the match, still wearing his gold medal around his neck, he proceeded directly to the Docklands Light Railway. Limardo was travelling with a group of about twenty of his compatriots. Upon their appearance, the BBC reported, “the carriage became little Caracas, with passengers clapping and cheering as Limardo’s crew taught them how to say ‘Well done’ in Spanish and led them in Venezuelan chants.” The actor Omid Djalili, who also happened to be on the train, took a picture and tweeted it. The rest of London went as nuts as the passengers. Going Underground, a blog about the London tube system, wrote:

We’re coming to the end of the first week of the Olympics & finally the Tube picture many of us have been waiting for. Forget shots of overcrowded Tubes (although as yet it hasn’t been worse than normal). Forget shots of tourists looking confused & herding round interchanges. Forget the shot of the Olympic torch being carried on the front of Tube train (although no one seemed to get that anyway). It’s the shot of an athlete carrying a Gold Medal on the London Underground.

The party changed at Canning Town and continued into central London on the Jubilee line.

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According to Matthew Beard, of the Evening Standard, British athletes have been spied at Mile End station; someone clocked members of the Rwandan team waiting for a train at Shoreditch High Street. Lashinda Demus, the Team U.S.A. hurdler (she won silver on Wednesday night in the four-hundred metres), has been commuting each day from her rental apartment to Olympic Park on the 257 bus. “I simply like riding on public transport,” she said, according the the Evening Standard, explaining why she’d chosen to forgo the chauffeured BMWs and empty lanes on offer to members of what is being called “the Olympic family.” She continued, “It’s only a couple of stops to where I am staying.”

For proof that a ride on London public transportation has somehow, over the course of the Games, come to offer cachet as well as convenience, one needed only to look to the United States men’s basketball team. These guys are well-travelled superstars. They can get around however they want. But on Monday night, after a victory over Argentina, Chris Paul’s Twitter feed featured a shot of a bunch of very tall men in their post-game sweats, waiting on the platform to catch the high-speed Javelin train from Olympic Park into town. “#fasterwaybacktothehotel,” Paul wrote. Hadn’t they heard the London Underground song?

The photo shoot continued on Instagram. There they were—Paul, Kobe, LeBron, mugging amid fluorescent lights and blue pleather. (Transport for London, the city’s equivalent of the M.T.A., is offering an “Olympic Legends”-themed tube map—the Lebron James stop, on the Rowing, Sailing, and Canoeing Line, is right between Ben Ainslie and Mia Hamm.) They looked like they were having fun. Was riding the train, and taking a picture of it, the new planking? Or had they gotten the idea from Rihanna?

See our full coverage of the Games at The Olympic Scene.

Photograph via Instagram.