2012 London Olympics: The 5 Worst Moments
The Olympics were good fun and everyone (bar Australia) seemed pretty pleased with how it all panned out. I’ve only just posted about the fantastic moments the Games provide so this will be a little more tongue in cheek.
These are the five worst moments of the Games.
The Crying Game
We all have a wee blub, now and again. With such unfaltering happiness it is great to see tears of joy. Sometimes it cannot be helped. However, there’s a big difference between the solitary tear and bawling like you’ve been told bacon no longer exists. At least, that is the only way I would act like poor Felix Sanchez. It’s good news, buddy, come on!
Wenlock and Mandeville
I’m sure that a lot of thought went into the official Olympic and Paralympic mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, but they sound like Victorian villains and look rather disturbingly like oversized male appendages with arms.
What’s more, as wonderfully enthusiastic as the blighters are, watching Wenlock stalk every gold medalist with a fluffy totem of himself was both terrifying and unnecessary. Cutting in on athletes congratulating each other to hand out golden tat made me want to kick a hole in my TV.
Throwing Matches
If you are part of a drive for integrity in sport and you have a loophole in front of you, with the whole world watching with bated breath, should you take it?
Well, the Koreans, Chinese and Indonesians did in the women’s doubles in badminton and it did not work out too well for them. Sure they strictly did nothing wrong, but the fact that people paid good money to sit through competitors actively trying to lose is deplorable. The system needs changed, but do not try to incontrovertibly break the current system.
For the record: saying that taking one game easy so as to rest is terrible. Sprinters pull up early, but they still try to win for 75% of the run.
The Closing Ceremony
Time ravaged Spice Girls. Musical binmen. Jessie J. Almost all of the music in the closing ceremony was awful. Muse also trooped out with the most clichéd, contrived piece of lyrical laziness about “winning” ever. And it got played over and over again!
Gone was the quirky intelligence of the opening ceremony; replaced with a fastidious study of holographs and groups popular with British 15 year-olds and few other human beings. Eric Idle shuffled out to try and add a bit of irony to proceedings, but all in all it was hackneyed and slovenly. Brazil simply samba’d their way into a ghost-stadium with fireworks going off intermittently.
Oh, and we had to watch two conservative politicians awkwardly dance as David Cameron and Boris ‘BoJo’ Johnson shuffled about like drunk fathers at a country wedding.
Drug Offences
It only came out today, but it is worth mentioning. Belarusian shot putter Nadzeya Ostapchuk was today stripped of her gold medal after testing positive for metenolone, a steroid.
The good thing is she was caught. The bad thing is that she was allowed, for a brief moment, to savor the glory of being an Olympic gold medalist. The technology and procedures could still improve, but here’s hoping for a future where the need to win does not override the need to respect each other and convey professionalism.
Just don’t dope, dope.
Honorable mentions?
I wouldn’t be that cruel. Not to the athletes who worked so hard. Frankly, the section of the US press lambasting their male gymnasts should consider that other nations simply had a good Olympics and that pressure is a very tricky entity.
Although anyone outside of Britain is lucky that they did not have to hear ‘Gold’ by Spandau Ballet every time an athlete triumphed.
Cheers, Olympics!
