Well… it’s only 1433 days to the next Olympics and if the cringe factor is anything to go by then they’re in with a chance of pulling off something special.
I remember well the way our mouths fell over with total embarrassment when the Sydney ‘exhibition’ athletes came riding into the stadium at Nagano on bicycles with inflatable kangaroos on their backs. Dire is an understatement but at least it smacked of fun in the sun and a less reverent atmosphere… which came true with the spectacular success Sydney eventually made of their Games.
So what did London promise. Well be had an aging rocker in Jimmy Page out of the ancient Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin groups… along with some wannabee singer belting out a verse from a song that had some… errr … questionable words in other verses. We also had a double decker bus that folded down to show some sort of montage of London tourist traps. And of course they had queues… umbrellas… and an aging footballer in the shape of David Beckham who might have found it hard to look more embarrassed than he was. It was *so* naff it really made my teeth curl.
No doubt by the time it opens in 2012, most of those images will have been quietly sidelined in the same way as our copulating kangaroos never showed their tails again and the Games will be as big a success as all the others. Right now though… all I can do is shudder.
The Eclectic Interweb 