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As Beijingers, Athenians, and Atlantans (particularly Richard Jewell) could attest, the Olympics—when they come to your town—can be a pain. In the run-up to the Opening Ceremony, the citizens of London have been focussed less on the power of the Games to “Inspire a Generation” than they have been on their potential to inconvenience the eight million people who live there. The inevitable aggravation at traffic and ticket prices has been exacerbated by the efforts of LOCOG, the organizing committee for the Games, to defend the prerogatives of the Games’ official corporate sponsors—a draconian overreach that culminated, last week, in police officers being forced to empty their packs of potato chips into clear polyurethane bags. Earlier, the owner of a deli had been ordered to take down a set of Olympic rings he’d fashioned from a quintet of bagels.
Sweaty commuters, packed into London’s woefully inadequate tube system, are confronted each day by a piped-in message: “Hi folks! This is the Mayor here. This is the greatest moment in the life of London for fifty years.” Last week, at the London Bridge tube stop, I thought there might be a riot. It was galling listening to Lord Coe, the head of the organizing committee, defend the designation of thirty miles of special lanes—“zil lanes,” they’re being called—for the use of Olympic dignitaries. “If I say to an athlete that it is thirty-one minutes from the Village to their venue, that is a very crucial thing to be able to establish, and to be able to deliver, because they will base every bit of timing, including when they get to their warmup and when they get to their race, on that time,” he told the BBC’s “Today” program. It did not seem to occur to Lord Coe that anyone else had anywhere to be in a timely fashion. Londoners were constantly being told to “get ahead of the Games,” but, the general complaint seemed to go, Why don’t the Games get ahead of us?
But, this week, the sun came out, and the mood, like everything else, brightened. Now, beach volleyball—which had threatened to be played in long johns—seemed a plausibility. (Whatever the weather, Prince Harry is attending.) Besides the onset of summer, the catalyst for Londoners’ improved attitude has been the terrific early word on Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony. Monday night, Boyle held a technical rehearsal at Olympic Stadium. Sixty thousand spectators attended, and—out of respect for Boyle’s wishes, indicated by screens displaying the hashtag #savethesurprise—barely one of them has breathed a word. We’ve been told that there will be sheepdogs, horses, and cricketers. And fake rain! Also—and this is where it gets interesting—National Health Service nurses. But beyond that, all the rest of us know is that, come Friday, we’d be wise to man the couches. A Telegraph headline read, “London 2012 Olympics: opening Games ceremony out of this world, so cancel your plans for Friday night.” The athletes can have the lanes.
To read our full coverage of the 2012 Games, visit The Olympic Scene.
Photograph by Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty Images.
