I'm just going to put this out there - I love the Olympics and I love that this year London will be host to the biggest event in the world. I'm proud that my home city will be part of a historical sporting extravaganza. One problem though, I have next to no tickets. Now I know next to no tickets is better than no tickets at all but the tickets I do have are for sports that won't be at the Olympic Park. Luckily I have been able to get tickets via the London Prepares series for 'Test Events'. A while back I got to spend the afternoon at the Velodrome and get my first view of track cycling, and this Saturday I had tickets for the BUCS Athletics at the Olympic Stadium.
Unfortunately I didn't take my camera with me but the stadium is a stadium, it's nice and all, but stadiums tend to look the same to me; big green bit in the middle, lots of seats. I went with a group of people from work and we had a whole line of seats to ourselves which was good, we were able to swap seats with each other for a chat and not worry about disturbing other people. We were sat right at the starting point for the 100 metres sprint and I can imagine that these seat will be going for stupid amounts of money for the Olympics, as the view was great. I've never been to an athletics event before so it was a whole new experience for me. There are so many different things happening at once that at times I didn't know where to look. Whilst people were racing round the track there were others pole vaulting, triple jumping and shot putting in the middle. I decided if I had to try a discipline it would be pole vaulting. I would be terrible at it, but it looked like fun. For the whole afternoon there was always something to watch and even if I got very cold I didn't get bored.
Included in our tickets was an event called '2012 Hours to Go: An Evening of Athletics and Entertainment'. There wasn't a lot of information about this but I thought it would be worth staying in the cold for (honestly beginning of May and I had to take my scarf and gloves, what is that about!) To put it bluntly it wasn't worth it. It was terrible, badly organised and just down right rubbish. We had a mix of Z list celebrities doing really crap 'fun' sporting 'entertainment', out of tune singers and a marching band that played 'The YMCA' and 'It's Raining Men'. Don't get me wrong I love both those songs, and the marching band was good, but the stadium was huge so you could hardly hear the band. To finish it off we had Seb Coe come down with some local kid to officially open the stadium. What a momentous occasion I think, how will they mark it? Fireworks? Big Light Show? A guitar solo by David Bowie on a big white cloud above us? I'm afraid to say it was none of those. They pressed a big button and a few balloons were released from some netting. Now I know they are saving the good stuff for the Opening Ceremony but I was disappointed; I had frozen my feet off to watch a few balloons float away. All it needed was them to release a couple of dog eared doves to get trapped in the stadium roof wires and it would have topped off the disorganised, shambolic, boring evening. So in summary, the sporting part of the day with the BUCS and UKA athletes was great, but LOCOG please keep the Z list celebrities away from the Olympics and let the sporting events speak for themselves. I for one, don't need the kind of entertainment I experienced Saturday night again.
I've 'borrowed' this photo from my friend to show you the view from our seats.
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