If London wanted to come over as informal, funny and self-deprecating, then Boris Johnson in an unbuttoned suit looking like a dishevelled sixth-former from The Dandy was the perfect contrast to the stiff-backed starchiness of his Chinese hosts.
The mayor followed up his flag-waving duties with an address that made Gordon Brown look as light on his feet as the 35-stone judoka from Guam. Chairman Mao gave wittier speeches than our Prime Minister.
When it came to presenting a friendly face of London, Bo-Jo had won the gold medal, but he returns from China to the dull grind of organising and administering the London Games. It is a four-year marathon for which we cannot yet know if he is fully equipped.
At a press conference last week, one journalist asked Johnson for his views on naming rights for the Olympic Stadium. He looked back blankly. In the front row, an adviser was vigorously shaking his head and making “don't go there” gestures with his hands. Johnson waffled his way around an issue that had clearly not come across his desk. Or if it had, he hadn't read the memo. Has he been terribly busy or did this expose a failure to grasp the detail?
The mayor followed up his flag-waving duties with an address that made Gordon Brown look as light on his feet as the 35-stone judoka from Guam. Chairman Mao gave wittier speeches than our Prime Minister.
When it came to presenting a friendly face of London, Bo-Jo had won the gold medal, but he returns from China to the dull grind of organising and administering the London Games. It is a four-year marathon for which we cannot yet know if he is fully equipped.
At a press conference last week, one journalist asked Johnson for his views on naming rights for the Olympic Stadium. He looked back blankly. In the front row, an adviser was vigorously shaking his head and making “don't go there” gestures with his hands. Johnson waffled his way around an issue that had clearly not come across his desk. Or if it had, he hadn't read the memo. Has he been terribly busy or did this expose a failure to grasp the detail?
What he did say on the stadium was that he had sent his people back to study how it should look beyond 2012. In this respect, Johnson has set himself a huge challenge that may just reveal how much more to him there is than a never-ending supply of bons mots.
Ah, stadiums. Football fans of every other nation would walk into the Bird's Nest and marvel at the breathtaking architecture. An Englishman would look at the running track and grumble: “You can't play football in here.”
This need to have the stands close to the pitch, sans track, is very much an English obsession. For the most part, it is to be encouraged on the grounds of the best views and the most raucous atmosphere.
But, perhaps benefiting from a cursory knowledge of sport, Johnson has asked the question: why should not football and athletics share the same arena? Are they really incompatible? It is a question worth asking, again and again, when we are spending £496million on an 80,000-capacity stadium that, as things stand, will be downgraded to a 25,000 athletics venue post-Olympics.
The organisers of the London Games call this downgrading “sustainability” when, to everyone else, it is the worst of all possible worlds to turn a vast, brand new construction into a small athletics venue to be used once every three decades for World Championships on top of a smattering of annual meetings.
Rightly, Johnson has demanded that the plans be looked at again to discern if football or rugby can share the venue. If not, he wants to discover how else can full value be extracted.
At a time when West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur are looking for new homes, Johnson wants to be satisfied that no stone has been left unturned before we start dismantling a stadium after a week of athletics. In this pursuit of value for money, he may have picked an interesting tussle with Lord Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, who promised an athletics stadium to the IOC as part of the bid.
Johnson inherited the stadium plans and all the other headaches that are wrapped up with the London Games. But now that has recognised a failure of planning, we await to discover if he can find a solution.
If he can pull that off long before the Games, Johnson will have scored a significant victory for himself and the residents of London. Otherwise, we may be tempted to conclude that Johnson, with that blond mane, grin and eagerness to please, is best turned into an Olympic mascot.
“I am aware of the need to come up with some furry creature,” he said in Beijing. “I was thinking of a great-crested newt.” It was another nice line, but now that he has won gold for a charismatic Olympic debut, we watch to see how effectively he can deliver.
Sausages and cash
The British Olympic Association (BOA) is proposing cash for our Olympic medal-winners, which is nothing new and, it must be said, shows a certain lack of creativity.
The Belarussians, for example, were on a bonus of sausages for the rest of their lives if they ended up on top of the podium in a generous deal offered by a local company, Belatmeat.
Meanwhile, Greece offered a job in the Armed Forces as an officer to medal-winners, according to Tasos Papchristou, the team spokesman. Most at the 2004 Games in Athens took up the posting.
If it comes down to raw cash, the BOA's proposed £20,000 per gold is lagging behind the times. Russia has more than tripled medal bonuses since 1996, at the urging
of Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, according to Gennadi Shvets, a spokesman. Champions in Beijing received €100,000 (about £80,000), as well as payments from sports funds and sponsors.
“We're not in it for the money,” Chris Hoy, the Great Britain cycling triple gold medal-winner, said in Beijing at the weekend, when pushed on the idea of podium bonuses. But would he be in it for the sausage meat?
Hedge fund came up short
There is a scene in This is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner's brilliant spoof rockumentary, in which the band have commissioned a 12-foot high Stonehenge replica. To their grave embarrassment, a wrongly written instruction leads to a 12-inch prop appearing on stage midriff.
Was it the same admin error that led to London's skyline being represented by a knee-high hedge on London's 2012 bus? The Chinese did epic. We did a foot-high Millennium Wheel.
Basket cases
To the office of David Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, to hear him predict that China could be challenging for Olympic medals in basketball by 2016. He is among the vast majority who view China's rise as a sporting superpower not only continuing post-Games, but quickening.
“There are 300 million basketball players here,” Stern said. “It is going to pick up and up at a rapid pace.” Let us be grateful that their football team remain pretty ordinary, for the time being
Ah, stadiums. Football fans of every other nation would walk into the Bird's Nest and marvel at the breathtaking architecture. An Englishman would look at the running track and grumble: “You can't play football in here.”
This need to have the stands close to the pitch, sans track, is very much an English obsession. For the most part, it is to be encouraged on the grounds of the best views and the most raucous atmosphere.
But, perhaps benefiting from a cursory knowledge of sport, Johnson has asked the question: why should not football and athletics share the same arena? Are they really incompatible? It is a question worth asking, again and again, when we are spending £496million on an 80,000-capacity stadium that, as things stand, will be downgraded to a 25,000 athletics venue post-Olympics.
The organisers of the London Games call this downgrading “sustainability” when, to everyone else, it is the worst of all possible worlds to turn a vast, brand new construction into a small athletics venue to be used once every three decades for World Championships on top of a smattering of annual meetings.
Rightly, Johnson has demanded that the plans be looked at again to discern if football or rugby can share the venue. If not, he wants to discover how else can full value be extracted.
At a time when West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur are looking for new homes, Johnson wants to be satisfied that no stone has been left unturned before we start dismantling a stadium after a week of athletics. In this pursuit of value for money, he may have picked an interesting tussle with Lord Coe, chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, who promised an athletics stadium to the IOC as part of the bid.
Johnson inherited the stadium plans and all the other headaches that are wrapped up with the London Games. But now that has recognised a failure of planning, we await to discover if he can find a solution.
If he can pull that off long before the Games, Johnson will have scored a significant victory for himself and the residents of London. Otherwise, we may be tempted to conclude that Johnson, with that blond mane, grin and eagerness to please, is best turned into an Olympic mascot.
“I am aware of the need to come up with some furry creature,” he said in Beijing. “I was thinking of a great-crested newt.” It was another nice line, but now that he has won gold for a charismatic Olympic debut, we watch to see how effectively he can deliver.
Sausages and cash
The British Olympic Association (BOA) is proposing cash for our Olympic medal-winners, which is nothing new and, it must be said, shows a certain lack of creativity.
The Belarussians, for example, were on a bonus of sausages for the rest of their lives if they ended up on top of the podium in a generous deal offered by a local company, Belatmeat.
Meanwhile, Greece offered a job in the Armed Forces as an officer to medal-winners, according to Tasos Papchristou, the team spokesman. Most at the 2004 Games in Athens took up the posting.
If it comes down to raw cash, the BOA's proposed £20,000 per gold is lagging behind the times. Russia has more than tripled medal bonuses since 1996, at the urging
of Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, according to Gennadi Shvets, a spokesman. Champions in Beijing received €100,000 (about £80,000), as well as payments from sports funds and sponsors.
“We're not in it for the money,” Chris Hoy, the Great Britain cycling triple gold medal-winner, said in Beijing at the weekend, when pushed on the idea of podium bonuses. But would he be in it for the sausage meat?
Hedge fund came up short
There is a scene in This is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner's brilliant spoof rockumentary, in which the band have commissioned a 12-foot high Stonehenge replica. To their grave embarrassment, a wrongly written instruction leads to a 12-inch prop appearing on stage midriff.
Was it the same admin error that led to London's skyline being represented by a knee-high hedge on London's 2012 bus? The Chinese did epic. We did a foot-high Millennium Wheel.
Basket cases
To the office of David Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, to hear him predict that China could be challenging for Olympic medals in basketball by 2016. He is among the vast majority who view China's rise as a sporting superpower not only continuing post-Games, but quickening.
“There are 300 million basketball players here,” Stern said. “It is going to pick up and up at a rapid pace.” Let us be grateful that their football team remain pretty ordinary, for the time being
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