London 2012

Every mention of the Olympics has been treated with disdain in my office - snide comments about the cost of it all, the traffic jams that would be caused by the specially marked lanes, the impossibility of the daily commute.... So I suppose I should not have really been surprised by the shared excitement of the race for gold.  I have never seen such an immediate volte-face by so many people in such a short space of time.  The moments of humour - ten people watching the rowing on a desktop PC when the screen froze less than a minute into the race then frantically running round the office to find another PC to watch the remainder of the race on (we won by the way.  Gold).

The opening ceremony united a nation.  Even my parents who weren't into the Olympics watched - and enjoyed it.  I loved it - although as many people commented, the BBC commentators weren't very good.  If they thought they were bad, they should have been in my flat.  The commentary that my flatmate provided had to be heard to be believed.  While she had heard of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (phew), she didn't seem to know who some of the others were.  I have heard since that the Americans on NBC thought IKB was Abraham Lincoln - and they didn't know who Tim Berners-Lee was.  Which is slightly terrifying. 

I still can't get the sports that I remember doing at school into these glamorous events by muscular lithe individuals, who do sweat (a lot in some cases) but still look great. How?  When I ran 100 metres I was in an aertex shirt and gym knickers and never looked that good before I ran, let alone afterward. My javelin throw would nearly pierce my foot, the discus would almost crush me.  In the triple jump I would fall backwards and get comments from the PE teacher about playing in the sandpit.  So how do you get from the trials and tribulations of sports day to the excellence of the Olympics?

To start with, you need to be good at sport... and that was where I fell down.  Literally in quite a lot of places.  So I decided early on that sport was not for me, and this year I decided to support London 2012 from the sidelines.  I watched the Show Jumping and the Men's Marathon and thoroughly enjoyed them.  For someone who loathes sport, it has been a good fortnight.