VaticanAssassin
God Mod
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- Jul 21, 2011
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My favorite sports writer (Simmons) is in London for the Olympics. His articles are long but I think if gives a good perspective of an American sports fan in London...
There are 5 volumes right now.Here is a Link. Enjoy....or not.
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8213326/grantland-2012-summer-olympics
excerpt:
I left Los Angeles on Sunday and arrived in London at noon the next day, thanks to one of those surreal red-eye flights in which you skip multiple time zones and feel like you time-traveled. London tossed a weather curveball for the first four days before it finally started drizzling a little on Friday; before that, the city was impossibly sunny and happy, like a weeklong Halter Top Day, with everyone prancing around wearing as little clothing as possible. Catch London on the right day and it's like Chicago or Boston — you walk around in disbelief saying, "Good lord, why doesn't everyone live here? This is awesome!" No different from a first-time craps shooter who rolls for 20 minutes and thinks to himself, Craps is my new game — I can't lose! And just like craps, London's weather will inevitably flip — we're probably headed for a monsoon any day now.
Quick tangent: I came here 30 years ago with my father, only remembering bits and pieces. Like how hard it was to find Red Sox scores, or how strange it was to drive in a car on the left side of the road, how a pub near our hotel had something called a "video jukebox" (basically, MTV as a jukebox, a big deal because we didn't have MTV yet). My big sweeping memory from that trip? The rain. It rained and rained and rained. It rained "November Rain" style. It rained harder than that. The locals never seem fazed, which made everything even stranger.
So if I wasn't expecting this week's heat wave, you can only imagine how the locals handled it. A few tubes (their underground tracks) even overheated at certain stations, sparking fears about the city's transit system breaking down during the Games. The good news: Everyone knows it's going to start pouring the moment the Olympics start. (Oh, wait, that's horrible news.) From what I can tell, London is prepared for everything except extreme heat. And that includes everyone's armpits. There's body odor, there's hellacious body odor, there's Vlade Divac after a quadruple-overtime playoff game in the mid-'90s, and then there's everyone in London during this week's heat wave. I think their bodies reject Old Spice the same way someone's body would reject a mismatched kidney.
Other than that? London is definitely prepared. Everyone's collective fear that terrorists might sabotage the Games — stemming from a tragic subway bombing that happened just one day after London won the 2012 bid — has been quelled, at least somewhat, by a noticeable influx of policemen and security officers pretty much everywhere you look. The general sentiment is, "Shut up and enjoy yourself; you're in the best city in the world."
Don't believe me? Time Out London splashed the following headline on this week's cover:
"WELCOME TO LONDON. GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD."
If that wasn't strong enough, here was the subhead in the top right corner.
Better museums than Berlin.
Cooler art than New York.
Wilder bars than Dublin.
More chuckles than Chicago.
Finer food than Paris.
(no, really.)
Before a last-minute flurry of flop-sweat stories (inevitable for any Olympics), I was starting to wonder if London was the Jason Terry of Olympic cities — irrationally cocky, totally convinced they're going to drop 35 and make the game-winning shot. Talking to the locals, everyone seems to feel one of two ways about the Summer Games (with no in-between):
Camp No. 1 (bitter): "The Olympics are a pain in the ass. The traffic will be a nightmare. The tubes will be too crowded. Everything is too expensive. What's the point? We already have the greatest city in the world — what do we have to prove? I hate that we did this."
Camp No. 2 (arrogant): "It's no big deal — I don't see our lives changing that much. London is the greatest city in the world. We were built to handle an event like this. Besides, everything's happening over in East London — nobody goes over there."
That much is true. They built the Olympic Village and most of the newer venues in East London, hoping to rejuvenate an atrophied section of the city.2 There aren't nearly enough hotels over there, which means most visitors are staying elsewhere else (and relying on tubes and buses). Because of London's size and proximity to other countries, we probably won't see a more crowded Olympics than this one. These past 48 hours, everyone has been scrambling for extra tickets — or in some cases, any tickets — with six events emerging as the toughest pulls:
There are 5 volumes right now.Here is a Link. Enjoy....or not.
http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8213326/grantland-2012-summer-olympics
excerpt:
I left Los Angeles on Sunday and arrived in London at noon the next day, thanks to one of those surreal red-eye flights in which you skip multiple time zones and feel like you time-traveled. London tossed a weather curveball for the first four days before it finally started drizzling a little on Friday; before that, the city was impossibly sunny and happy, like a weeklong Halter Top Day, with everyone prancing around wearing as little clothing as possible. Catch London on the right day and it's like Chicago or Boston — you walk around in disbelief saying, "Good lord, why doesn't everyone live here? This is awesome!" No different from a first-time craps shooter who rolls for 20 minutes and thinks to himself, Craps is my new game — I can't lose! And just like craps, London's weather will inevitably flip — we're probably headed for a monsoon any day now.
Quick tangent: I came here 30 years ago with my father, only remembering bits and pieces. Like how hard it was to find Red Sox scores, or how strange it was to drive in a car on the left side of the road, how a pub near our hotel had something called a "video jukebox" (basically, MTV as a jukebox, a big deal because we didn't have MTV yet). My big sweeping memory from that trip? The rain. It rained and rained and rained. It rained "November Rain" style. It rained harder than that. The locals never seem fazed, which made everything even stranger.
So if I wasn't expecting this week's heat wave, you can only imagine how the locals handled it. A few tubes (their underground tracks) even overheated at certain stations, sparking fears about the city's transit system breaking down during the Games. The good news: Everyone knows it's going to start pouring the moment the Olympics start. (Oh, wait, that's horrible news.) From what I can tell, London is prepared for everything except extreme heat. And that includes everyone's armpits. There's body odor, there's hellacious body odor, there's Vlade Divac after a quadruple-overtime playoff game in the mid-'90s, and then there's everyone in London during this week's heat wave. I think their bodies reject Old Spice the same way someone's body would reject a mismatched kidney.
Other than that? London is definitely prepared. Everyone's collective fear that terrorists might sabotage the Games — stemming from a tragic subway bombing that happened just one day after London won the 2012 bid — has been quelled, at least somewhat, by a noticeable influx of policemen and security officers pretty much everywhere you look. The general sentiment is, "Shut up and enjoy yourself; you're in the best city in the world."
Don't believe me? Time Out London splashed the following headline on this week's cover:
"WELCOME TO LONDON. GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD."
If that wasn't strong enough, here was the subhead in the top right corner.
Better museums than Berlin.
Cooler art than New York.
Wilder bars than Dublin.
More chuckles than Chicago.
Finer food than Paris.
(no, really.)
Before a last-minute flurry of flop-sweat stories (inevitable for any Olympics), I was starting to wonder if London was the Jason Terry of Olympic cities — irrationally cocky, totally convinced they're going to drop 35 and make the game-winning shot. Talking to the locals, everyone seems to feel one of two ways about the Summer Games (with no in-between):
Camp No. 1 (bitter): "The Olympics are a pain in the ass. The traffic will be a nightmare. The tubes will be too crowded. Everything is too expensive. What's the point? We already have the greatest city in the world — what do we have to prove? I hate that we did this."
Camp No. 2 (arrogant): "It's no big deal — I don't see our lives changing that much. London is the greatest city in the world. We were built to handle an event like this. Besides, everything's happening over in East London — nobody goes over there."
That much is true. They built the Olympic Village and most of the newer venues in East London, hoping to rejuvenate an atrophied section of the city.2 There aren't nearly enough hotels over there, which means most visitors are staying elsewhere else (and relying on tubes and buses). Because of London's size and proximity to other countries, we probably won't see a more crowded Olympics than this one. These past 48 hours, everyone has been scrambling for extra tickets — or in some cases, any tickets — with six events emerging as the toughest pulls:
