How will we remember London 2012?
Team GB’s own version of Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, created to celebrate their success at London 2012, was perhaps the perfect way to sum up two weeks of outstanding achievement that captivated a nation as we became a truly United Kingdom.
Prior to the Games, as NASA sent “a rocket ship to Mars”, security fears and empty seats suggested that London was quickly becoming “a satellite … out of control”, whilst the athletes were nothing but “sex machines ready to reload”.
However, as David Beckham carried the Olympic torch “burning through the sky” on its way to the Olympic Stadium, another flame of Olympic passion was ignited in the hearts of the British people and we watched on, awestruck, for two magnificent weeks as our McCartney-clad heroes claimed the highest British medal count since London first hosted the Games in 1908.
In decades time, people will no doubt remember where they were on ‘Super Saturday’, 4th August 2012, when over 17 million people watched “Mister Farah-nheit”, Greg Rutherford and “supersonic woman” Jessica Ennis, “travelling at the speed of light” (almost) on their way to winning 3 gold medals in the space of 44 minutes.
Danny Boyle’s focusing of the opening ceremony around Caliban’s dream from The Tempest, marked the beginning of an Olympic Games that was as much about revolution as evolution.He paid tribute to British history, to the founding of our nation, but London 2012 was not born out of a desire to recapture London 1908, or indeed London 1948. His pointed celebrations of suffragism, the NHS and the subtle Beatles nod to the 1968 Games of Norman, Smith, and Carlos, emphasized what Rowan Atkinson’s take on the epochal Chariots of Fire beach-running scene humorously displayed.
These games were to be a celebration of the courage of protest and dissent, they were to be a truly modern celebration of sporting achievement, and, as Lord Coe put it, they were for everyone.
Vangelis’ ‘Chariots of Fire’ became the defining sound of London 2012, resonating throughout the various stadia arenas, and its story captures what, for me, the Games were really about.
When Hugh Hudson, director of Chariots of Fire, decided to use Vangelis’ eponymous score, he said, “I knew we needed a piece which was anachronistic to the period to give it a feel of modernity”.
Boyle’s ceremony captured Blake’s pleasant pastures and dark satanic mills in a technicolor 80,000 seat stadium; whilst the collocation of traditional landmarks with recently-inducted Olympic sports (Horse Guards Parade and Beach Volleyball, for example); and marathon route, which saw competitors racing past The Palace of Westminster, St. Paul’s Cathedral and The Tower of London, encapsulated exactly what Hudson sought to achieve thirty years previously.
Crucially, Coe’s Olympic vision was built upon the great phalanx of the British people, whom Boyle so wonderfully portrayed as the defining constant amidst his kaleidoscopic depiction of British history.
The body of 70,000 volunteers were very much, “the best of British”, and deserved every bit of grandeur in their title as ‘Games Makers’. In the past few weeks, London has lived up to its billing as the centre of an Isles of Wonder, but perhaps Miranda’s exclamation from Act V of The Tempest is more fitting:
“O, Wonder! How many goodly creatures there are here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!”
Those most goodly of creatures, the Olympic athletes themselves, and in particular those from Team GB, put in some astonishing performances. Although only 29 world records were set, 4 fewer than in the Beijing 2008 Olympics, two thirds of the Beijing world records were set in the pool, with the advantage of vacuum-packed, ultra-aerodynamic swimsuits.
That those suits were banned in 2009 makes the 8 swimming world records that were broken in London even more impressive. Similarly, both the 4x100m men’s and women’s athletics world records were broken, with Jamaica and the USA becoming the first teams ever to break 37 and 41 seconds, respectively.
Importantly, in breaking the women’s world record, the Americans erased the final athletics record held by the former East Germany (41.37s set in 1985).
As the familiar faces of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt cemented their positions as Olympic legends, we saw the birth of new, previously lesser-known, Olympic heroes in Belgian-born Bradley Wiggins, Oregon-resident Mo Farah, and David Rudisha, whom the BBC dubbed ‘the greatest athlete you have never heard of’.
The prominence of Olympic poster-girls such as Missy Franklin, Jessica Ennis and Victoria Pendleton, combined with the fact that every competing nation had at least one female athlete for the first time ever, led to London 2012 being ascribed as the ‘Female Olympics’.
With this in mind, one can only wonder whether Lord Coe knew that Britain’s first and last medals of London 2012 would be won by Team GB’s modern-day Amazonians, Lizzie Armitstead and Samantha Murray.
This summer’s Olympics heralded a ‘brave new world’ of sporting achievement and opportunity for British athletes, and, with the likes of Tom Daley, Laura Trott and Katarina Johnson-Thompson ready to lead the British challenge in Rio 2016, it seems the much-talked of ‘legacy’ is in safe hands.
Before the leaves of our golden summer fall to the ground though, let us stop for a moment and acknowledge that, as King Coe (or soon to be if his upward trajectory continues!) put it, “when our time came Britain, we did it right”.
Forget about the post-Olympic hangover and do as The Times’ Simon Barnes advises, “When you get an upgrade in life, spare no thought for the future. Just get as much of that free champagne down you as possible and live and love in the moment”.
