Wednesday 15 August 2012

Olympic Comedown

London has finished hosting the Olympic Games. After waiting 7 years for the bid, all the Olympic action is now over after only 17 days of seeing the athletes literally go through blood, sweat and tears. Without sounding incredibly biased, I believe that the Games dramatically exceeded expectations of most residents of the UK. Who would ever have expected a small island to come third in the medals table after two of the biggest nations in the world?! Certainly not us.

This Games' slogan was to 'Inspire a Generation' and I genuinely believe it will. I even have friends that now want to start training in the possibility of being selected for Rio! Not only are we inspiring a generation, but we also need to celebrate a generation. We saw some incredibly talented athletes that smashed world records; almost with ease, by the likes of Missy Franklin, Ruta Meilutye and Ye Shiwen. Their respective ages are: 16, 15, 16 and the likelihood is that they'll improve even further because they are so young and still have room for improvement, which is quite a scary thought. However, by children and young adults seeing girls like these dominate their fields (in this case, swimming) at such a young age, they will feel encouraged to become more active and competitive in sport.

I will admit though that there were some major errors on the behalf of the organisers of the Games, mainly regarding tickets. It was an absolute nightmare and they really should have been better prepared. When tickets were released online, the website kept crashing, which caused hundreds, if not thousands of people to lose out on tickets; which is quite appalling, and the Games hadn't even started yet, leaving the majority of the public with a very negative foresight to the remainder of the Games. However, after the Opening Ceremony, the organisers had redeemed themselves. What they didn't consider again actually during the Games was tickets, arguably the most important factor! When people arrived at the ticket office on-site at the Games, they were forced to queue for over 7 hours to collect their tickets and some people queued all that time and received no tickets at all. Come on London, how was this not thought of?!

[Link here to teach Rio what they can learn from London: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19239265]

Despite all of these issues, the Games were a vast success and the people that are responsible for this have got to be the volunteers. They were absolutely amazing and I cannot praise them enough, they are what made the Games what they were and they deserve HUGE amounts of respect.

Whether we see an improvement in the UK economy is yet to be established, however whether we do or not, it's been a once in a lifetime experience and it was truly amazing. I've never seen the country be so patriotic and gracious towards other competitors. It makes me very proud to be British.

Well done London 2012, but now it's over, what am I going to watch on TV?!


No comments:

Post a Comment