The Olympics are over, and I think I might actually miss them. Despite spending most of July working out if I could walk to work and presuming that public transport during them would be only marginally preferable to getting to work in a massive sauna that you had to queue for, it actually seems like they were a pretty big success. I’m going to be sad to see them go, in fact I’d go as far to say that they changed my life for the better while they were on. I’m still not entirely sure they were worth £10 billion, but I’d say at least £7-8 billion, and I’m not even accounting for the legacy or sustainability prospects.
I’m not a particularly big fan of sport in general, either playing or watching. I find playing it embarrassing (hand-eye co-ordination isn’t one of my strong points) and watching it tedious. The Olympics, however, is another matter. I think it’s probably because we started picking up medals and then the possibility of ‘winning (or at least coming third on Gold medals, but that’s basically winning in my eyes) seemed so realistic, but I’ve found myself feeling disappointed when that medal that was in the bag falls through our (that’s right, our, that’s how into it I’ve got) fingers and elated when we a surprise gold comes through. That’s at least slightly better than my usual feeling of pure apathy where sport is concerned.
Actually caring also makes it easier to fit in with the rest of society, especially as I’m currently on an internship and desperate for any sort of common ground/conversation starter now that my usual anecdotes of crew dates, tutes and general ‘banter’ have been rendered inappropriate. The first four weeks passed and, I’ll admit it, I was struggling. A particularly awkward example of this was when the guy next to me asked if I’d seen the cricket score. I hadn’t. Even if I had I probably wouldn’t have understood it, caring as much about the England cricket team as I imagine he did about the Hungarian lower leagues of Handball (his loss in my opinion, those games can really get the blood pumping). But luckily, thanks to BBC livetext’s commentary and the fact that nobody knows what’s going on in most of the sports anyway/the sports are judged on how they look, I’m a veritable expert. Usain Bolt? Yeah, he’s pretty fast. Tom Daley? Has some excellent dives but sometimes his finish can be off. The North Korean man who lifted 3x his own body weight? Strong. I’ve already cleared space in my schedule for when I’m asked to commentate.
It’s also just so watchable, and there’s so many things going on through the day that it’s pretty hard to get bored of it. I have quite a short attention span and constantly need something to occupy me during the day, normally something that has an address that begins with ‘www.’. Any other time of year I’d flick between facebook, bbc news, google news (I like to keep up to date with current affairs), the daily mail website (all current affairs and no celeb gossip makes matt a dull boy) and Wikipedia. Now I spend at least 4% less time on each of these websites and that’s presuming I split my time equally between them and the Olympics. It’s probably at least 5%, maybe even 6. There’s always some obscure medal hope that, if there’s any vague chance of a medal, will leave me refreshing if live text doesn’t refresh fast enough. Sometimes even that isn’t enough, the ‘Jump-Off’ took a whole hour out of my day…
