Tag: stadium

Guest Post: 7 Reasons Why It’s Best To Skip The London Olympics

London 2012 Olympic Logo (via Andrea Vascellari)

1. Public Apathy. The 2012 London Olympics begins on Friday, 27th July 2012 and already excited Londoners are basing their holiday plans around this auspicious event – one in ten are planning to go on holiday during the Games to avoid them completely.^ The fact that so many of the ‘hosts’ of the competition are planning to do a runner suggests that the marathon course could be as deserted as the opening scenes of the film 28 Days Later – not a great look.

2. The Weather. There’s a reason why the Olympics are traditionally held in sunny countries. Have you ever seen an Olympics 100m final run in the pouring rain? Let’s see how fast Usain Bolt is when he’s knee-deep in smoggy water as the starting pistol fires.

3. The Logo. Now, be honest; would you stick this piece of art on your fridge door if your child brought it home from school? And for a logo which was designed to reflect the cultural diversity of the games it seems to have upset an amazingly diverse bunch of people. Iran has objected on the grounds that it thinks the logo spells out the word ‘Zion’ and a British man rang a London radio station to claim that he had suffered a seizure while watching footage on television that used the symbol. “It came up on TV and I was thinking about the 2012 Games and then I was out,” he said.

4. The Olympic Torchbearer. The quirky choice of logo raises the worrying possibility that Olympic supremo Sebastian Coe will go for a quirky choice of individual to light the flame at the opening ceremony. While Atlanta had Muhammad Ali to light the cauldron in 1996, it is a terrifying thought that Britain might opt for someone like Kriss Akabusi, Eddie ‘The Eagle’ Edwards or Zara Phillips’ new horse. Lord Coe must put modesty aside and light the torch himself!

5. Organisation. If you excuse the pun, Britain doesn’t have a great track record of organising big events recently. Anyone who remembers the Millennium celebrations will shudder at recalling a glum-looking Queen joining hands with Tony Blair to sing Auld Lang Syne. Blair himself has said that he would have “preferred a visit to the dentist” to attending the opening night of the Millennium Dome and he was the man who rubber-stamped its construction. Then there was the breakdown of the VIP train carrying guests to the ceremony, the decision that the new London Eye wheel wasn’t safe to carry passengers on the big night and Prince Phillip anxiously remarking that the acrobats swinging above his wife’s head didn’t have a safety harness.

6. The Football. Great Britain’s participation in the Olympics football tournament seems to point to a distinct lack of organisational skills. Worries that there would be an English bias to team selection were dismissed by the GB committee – who then put England assistant manager Stuart Pearce in charge of picking the squad. The Welsh FA and Scottish FA soon started discouraging their players from participating for reasons too complicated to detail here and, at time of going to press (29th February 2012) tickets for the matches have yet to sell out.

7. The Stadium. Will it really be ready in time? Delays to the opening of the new Wembley suggest that all may not be smooth. The prospect of the hammer being tossed while builders are still hammering in the final nails is a nightmare scenario which is best enjoyed while sipping a cocktail on a foreign beach. Enjoy!

^Research by Price Waterhouse Cooper, August 2011

Author bio: James Christie writes for Thomson Local, a business directory which is the ideal resource for looking up travel agents when planning a foreign holiday during the Olympics.

February 29, 2012
7 Reasons That The Pole Vault is Weird

It’s almost Christmas, dear readers, and what better and more seasonal topic is there to ruminate over than the pole vault? Well, possibly just about any other topic but, as I was lying in bed, unwell, with a bit of a fever, my thoughts naturally turned to the pole vault (well, whose wouldn’t?) and it struck me that the pole vault is really, really weird. Here’s why.

…and so does your sport.

1. Titular Obscurity. We all know what the pole vault is, because we’re introduced to it at a young age. But what if we didn’t know? Other athletics events are titularly obvious; the high jump; the long jump, we know what to expect from those just by their names. But what would we expect to see if told that we were about to witness the pole vault? It sounds like someone jumping over a pole, or a cellar for keeping Polish people in. Or leaping over a Polish person. Or Polish people vaulting. Or a storage area for poles. What the name doesn’t convey is anything at all about what you can expect to see, which is a Russian man with a stick jumping over a bar (which doesn’t resemble the sort of bar that you’d want to frequent at all, it’s just another stick the other way up, balanced between two other sticks). It’s literally all sticks. I would rather watch the cellar full of Polish people.

2. It’s Cheating. The closest relation to the pole vault must surely be the high jump; an event in which athletes compete to see who can jump the highest – something that we can all identify with and can do ourselves at home. But the pole vault takes the noble pursuit of seeing who can leap the highest, and adds a long pole into the mix so that competitors can go three times as high as they would naturally be able to. But why? Of course you can go higher if you have a ruddy great stick to help you. I can swim much faster than normal if I’m wearing flippers and Speedos with jet propulsion, but that doesn’t make me a good swimmer. Fortunately, I doubt that they’re going to make the 100 metres backstroke with flippers and jet-thrusting-pants an Olympic event alongside the regular swimming any time soon, which is a good thing, because I’d look bloody stupid in that getup and I never win anything anyway. And it would be weird, and we already have the pole vault for that.

3. They’re Missing The Point. Pole vaulters vault to see who can vault the highest, but that’s not even the point of vaulting. Because vaulting originated as a way for the Dutch to cross dykes (everyone glad that I’m not AA Gill at this moment? Good, me too). So the true measure of the vaulter’s prowess should be distance. In short, they’re doing it wrong. Let’s make them vault over a river; that would be true to the origins of the sport and a damned sight more entertaining. They’re missing the point of their own sport.

4. Exclusion. It keeps better events out of the Olympics. Because I don’t need to know who can jump very high with the help of a big stick. I want to see people test the limits of human performance without artificial aid. Do you know what I want to know? I want to know how fast people can spin, because we just don’t know that. I propose the one minute spin, an event in which each competitor stands within a circle a metre in diameter and has a minute in which to spin as many times as possible (clockwise or anti-clockwise, it’s freestyle), and the winner is the person who attains the highest rate of RPM. That’s what I want to see, and then I want to watch them trying to walk back to their chairs and attempting to put their tracksuit bottoms back on. Because that sort of spectacle would make the Olympics ten times better.

5. The Equipment Is Unwieldy. And what right-minded person would take up the bloody sport in the first place? If I were tall, athletic and good at going over bars (rather than sitting behind them. Still, two out of three isn’t bad) I’d choose the high jump. Because it’s exactly the same as the pole vault, but you don’t have to lug a pole around with you as a part of your kit. Because taking up the pole vault is like taking up the double bass or the tuba. It’s absolutely ridiculous. What if you were reliant on public transport? How would you fancy trying to get on a rush-hour tube train with a seventeen foot long pole? It’s difficult enough with a modestly proportioned holdall or a large satchel. Okay, so you’d be able to hold the doors open for as long as it took to get on but, I speak with absolute confidence here, it would be a bit burdensome. In fact, it would be a faff. In much the same way that holding up the world was a faff for Atlas.

6. Double Entendre. There is literally nothing that you can say about pole vaulting that isn’t a double entendre. After all, it’s a sport which involves physically exerting yourself until you’re panting and thrusting a long, rigid shaft into a box before you briefly soar heavenward and eventually end up lying sweaty and exhausted on a mattress with a horizontal pole. And if there isn’t scope for euphemism, metaphor, allusion and plain seaside postcard bawdiness there then…um…well there just clearly is. And Wikipedia isn’t even trying for innuendo when it says, “…pole stiffness and length are important factors to a vaulter’s performance.” It is impossible to discuss the pole vault without innuendo.

7. Confusion. Because while the name pole vault, as we have established, is misleading, once you’ve accepted the illogic of it, you’re in for further frustration and disappointment. When I was four years old and I started school, you can have absolutely no idea how excited I was when I was told that in the school gym there was a vaulting horse. A vaulting horse, I thought with wide-eyed astonishment. That’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard in my life. They’ve got a horse that can vault! A raging stallion that can shoot itself into the sky with the aid of a pole! A pony that can rocket over a lofty bar! A mare that can soar through the air and land on a mattress! They’ve got a wondrous, magical creature! The most awesome beast I ever will see! They’ve got an athletic super-horse! They’ve got…that wooden thing in the corner that looks like a weird shed for midgets? What the hell is that? Is life always going to be like this?

December 21, 2010
7 Reasons That Vuvuzelas Are Annoying

1. The Obsession. The nation is obsessed with the vuvuzela. It’s impossible to read a newspaper, listen to the radio, watch the television, go to the pub, or read an internet humour site without someone bleating on about vuvuzelas. But I think that this focus on the vuvuzela is causing us to miss out on other World Cup stories. We’re just not getting enough ill-informed conjecture about problems with the ball: Is it that it’s too round? Is it the altitude? Does it fly too straight? Doesn’t it fly straight enough? Does it look too much like a fly?

It's a fly!

All of the coverage of the vuvuzelas is preventing us from having what we really want. 24 hour per day coverage of the ball. And more Robbie Savage.

2. The Name. The English language is a fusion of many languages from around the world and a lot of our words come from other countries. We get bungalow from India, sepia from Italy, mammoth from Russia and surrender from France (rather unsurprisingly). Yet it’s safe to say that our language wasn’t aided in its evolution by anyone who had been involved in professional football as, in the past week – from various players and former-players – I’ve heard “vuvulas”, “vuvuslas”, “the horns” and from Sir Geoff Hurst, no less, “uvuvezlas”. The awful mangling of the word vuvuzela is possibly the only thing that’s more grating than the sound of the instrument itself.

3. Stadium Atmosphere. The din of the vuvuzelas drowns out everything else occurring in the stadiums. This isn’t always a bad thing, as it drowned out the sound of happy Germans on Sunday, but it drowned everything else out too. The crowd reaction, singing, cheering, chanting, abuse; in fact, just about all of the things that reflect the partisan nature of football. The drone of massed vuvuzelas is a relentless unremitting cacophany that doesn’t abuse the referee, ask Fabio to dance, play the theme from The Great Escape (sorry, poor argument); doesn’t do anything fun or interesting at all. It’s just noise. An incessant racket that drowns out everything good about the stadium atmosphere. Everything.

4. Domestic Atmosphere. The vuvuzela operates at a similar pitch and tone to the human voice which means that, when you’re viewing the World Cup at home, you’re trying to filter out the frequency that other people in the room are speaking at. Thanks to the vuvuzela, if my wife turned to me during a match and said, “Would you like a beer?” or “Jennifer Aniston’s at the door, she wants to know if you can come out to play,” I probably wouldn’t hear her. Experience tells me that she’s unlikely to say either of those things, but what if she did and I missed it? Catastrophe. I hate going to the fridge.

5. Envy. It’s substantial, straight and three feet long, and I must say that I’m quite jealous, as there’s no way I could take anything like that to a football match in England. I’d probably be fed to a police-horse or charged with possession of a vuva vovos avuvuvu…“I’ll let you off with a caution this time sonny, now on your way”. We don’t even get trusted with bottled water over here.

6. Sound. The sound of massed vuvuzelas is like the sound of a swarm of angry wasps, but deeper. Usually, the larger an animal is, the deeper the sound that they make – so it’s giant angry wasps that we’ll hear the sound of all summer. Giant angry wasps! Well I certainly won’t be falling asleep during a match, or at any time at all during the summer. Except when Andy Townsend’s “analysing” the action, that is.

7. We’re Stuck With Them. There is only one thing that would be worse than enduring the sound of the vuvuzela: That would be banning the vuvuzela. Just because we Europeans have our own expectations of how a football match should be viewed, it doesn’t mean that they should be forced on the rest of the world. This is South Africa’s World Cup, and god knows they’ve earned it. World Cup 2010 should be a uniquely African spectacle and, much to my annoyance, this includes that giant dung beetle thing from the opening ceremony and the bloody vuvuzelas. But we shouldn’t be downhearted about this; sometimes the most memorable parts of World Cups are the unique things that the host nations bring to them. Mexico ’86’s wave, Argentina ’78’s ticker-tape, Italia ’90’s Three Tenors and USA ’94’s blank incomprehension about some sort of soccer-ball tournament going on. Long after many of the matches and incidents are forgotten, these are the memories that remain. And so it will be with the vuvuzela. We will have to suffer it for a month or so, but in time it’ll be the thing that the tournament is remembered for. We may even feel nostalgia for it. Eventually.

June 15, 2010