Olympics August 3

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Lone Wolf '49

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Friday, August 3
(Please excuse the typos. Going too fast. There’s much Olympics to explore.)
Breakfast: Mixed fruit, great link sausage, scrambled eggs, canaloni beans (pork ‘n to us rednecks), wheat toast with currant jelly, orange juice, yogurt. Uh-oh: no awesome crisp bacon yesterday or today; instead, they served Wimpy British Bacon (WBB). Yuck.
Well, the sport of athletics (“track and field” to us Americans) begins today. They say it took 600 workers 60 hours to convert the Olympic Stadium from the opening ceremony configuration into the track-and-field configuration.
Commute: Red double-deck bus at 7:30 a.m. from Russell Square to Lord’s Cricket Ground for archery. Then another bus from Lord’s to the MPC.
Archery is one of my favorite Olympic sports. It’s peaceful and dignified. Like everything else, television doesn’t give the full picture. For one thing, it’s a LONG way from the archers’ positions to the targets.
Outside the seating area, experts gave archery lessons to children; they excitedly fired at targets five yards away. I watched one six-year-old, barely taller than the bow, smile with glee when his arrow struck the target. His mum and dad were equally thrilled.
Lord’s Cricket Ground is also a noble venue. The spacious press box and sky boxes are modern, but the rest of te facility takes you back in time. “Home of Cricket” is not just a slogan; the place was built in 1890. The Marylebone Cricket Club, which owns the place, was founded in 1787. Let me repeat that: 1787. Don and Fred, two members dressed resplendently in white jackets, watched the wide wooden stairs; they’re :Pavilion Stewards.”
To get to the press tribune for archery, you walk past a dining room with high-backed chairs and paintings, including one of stern-looking Benjamin Aislebe “honourable secretary, 1822-1824.” Let me repeat that: 1822-1942.
The archery stands and shooting area (I forget the official name for it) are basically from home plate to center field—if there was a home plate, or a center field. Of course, the field is much bigger, but it’s as if they dropped two tennis courts end-to-end into Yankee Stadium and put bleachers on either side. None of the Cricket Ground seats are used for fans, but the media tribune has been built into seats outside the stately Pavilion.
The last cricket match before the Games was July 25, according to dignified-but-friendly-after-a-while Don, adjusting his tie and pulling his white jacket into place. (Bowl guys are not the only ones who proudly wear colored jackets.)
Yes, the grounds were hit by bombs during The Blitz. I loved the charming names of the seating areas: Rather than Section 1, Section 2, Section 3, etc., there’s the Allen Stand, Tavern Stand, Mound Stand, Eldrich Stand, Compton Stand, Grand Stand (yes, indeed; do you suppose?:….) and Warner Stand.
It was a beautiful and breezy spring-like morning. Perfect for cricket. And archery. The Americans were eliminated yesterday, so I was just a tourist.
Well, I finally found a hot dog. Folks were chomping down on this one at Lord’s Cricket Ground—for breakfast.. At least, it looked an awful lot like a hot dog. The “sausage baguette” had a fat link sausage in a hotdog bun. “That’s a lot of money to spend for breakfast,” said a British grandmother. I was full from breakfast and didn’t have one. Oh, the shame of it!
Lunch: Yogurt, cookies, peanut butter crackers.
Today’s confirmation that George Bernard Shaw was right when he wrote that we and the British are “two peoples separated by a common language.” Catherine P. asked if those red sweaters worn by the schoolchildren’s choir are called “jumpers.” One British woman said it’s mostly an archaic term, but is still used in the northern part of the UK.
Speaking of Shaw, there is nowhere else on earth that I would rather be. Except maybe Lugert.
Volunteer du jour: Joel, 50-ish, and Mihaela, who looked about 14 but probably was twice that, directing pedestrians to Lord’s Cricket Ground. Their Olympics will be over after today, because archery will be over They signed up for fun and had it. For them, standing on the same street corner with pink foam “we’re No. 1” fingers was as important a job as Sebastian Coe’s, and they were proud of it.
Sad? Yes, they’ll be sad. “But I’ll be happy not to have to stand on my feet for eight hours,” Joel said.
I asked if they had met any Americans. “You’re the only one who stopped to talk to us. The Americans are always in a hurry.”
At the Olympics, you could walk the same path for 10 days, only to have it shut off on Day 11, which would make it necessary to walk 14 miles around the back way to cross the street. Well, today the opposite happened. Locog had constructed a massive foot bridge between the IBC and Olympic Park, across a street that only seemed to be used by few buses each day. Well, today the security folks began letting credentialed people walk directly across the street. Victory!
Weather: Sunny and breezy after a rain this morning. High 70, low 59.
Olympic Park was wall-to-wall people this afternoon. It was a cross between two place I love: Disneyland and the Texas State Fair on THAT Saturday, without the deep-fried Twinkies. And without the profane shirts and chants. Dignity is SO pleasant.
Dinner: Yogurt, cookies and a Powerbar.
The British are SO darn excited about these games. When we’re walking along out of Olympic Park, folks glance at our credentials, I suppose counting coup on countries. “Look, he’s with the Olympics.”
A reporter today asked me for a comment about who the journalists like to interview. I politely deferred to the USOC staff. By the way, the staff works extremely hard. They’re talented and great fun to watch.
I think people believe the USA is like the Yankees. I figure it’s my job to be like Yogi or Mantle or Jeter so folks will think, “well, those stinkers have more money than we do, and they win all the time, but they’re good human beings.” (I must confess to having been a Yankee-hater from about 1956 until I stopped worrying about it—which was some time last month.)
On the bus to The ExCel Centre were four men who smelled vaguely like garlic and old fish.
Nicki went off to the British Museum after work. The museum remains open until 8:30 p.m. every Friday. She found a perfect Shakespeare exhibit that seemed to have been set up exactly for her. Of course, she also found the Rosetta Stone which is now in a thick kind of glass box. The REAL Rosetta Stone. She absolutely, totally loved it.
I worked until 7:30, and then started off for indoor volleyball. But there was no bus, so I hopped on the next double-decker and it took me across the river, under the cable cars and way east to table tennis and boxing. Four venues (boxing, table tennis, judo and weightlifting) are at The ExCel Centre, a convention center so large that another double-decker is necessary to haul folks from hall to hall. (But for the second time today, I was the only person on the bus.)
And later I discovered it was more fun to walk, which is always the case.
Anyhow, the table tennis venue had four tables not unlike the one that my mother “bought” for me with green stamps 50 years ago (it’s still in our basement), each inside a little fence, with space for cameras between. It was dark in the venue except for the bright lights shining on the tables. The whole deal was surrounded by about 20 rows of bleachers; I guess 2,000 people were there. The South Korean lost to the German in the dangdest thing I have ever seen. The guys dove and danced and lunged into the next county to whack the ball back onto the table, which looked about the size of a postage stamp. And then Portugal and Great Britain topped it by playing doubles and miraculously avoiding smashing into each other or arguing about who messed up. Sadly, GBR lost in two. I hadn’t seen live TT since the Seoul Olympics and wondered why.
I got so excited about the great action that I forgot to take a photo.
I left the table tennis hall and walked maybe probably sorta nearly a half-mile past concession stands featuring Chinese, Italian, Plain Ole and other good-looking food to the boxing venue. On the way, I passed 20 Koreans conducting a pep rally. I think maybe they were saying, “Beat the h--- out of Netherlands Antilles.” But probably not since this is the Olympics and therefore civilized.
Inside boxing, I ran into V, a good-guy photographer from Dallas. Good grief, this whole night is about Big D.
 

Lone Wolf '49

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Conitinued.....................

Thanks to good direction from helpful volunteers, almost all of whom were either cute with auburn hair or cute with cornrows, I got to my nice seat in the press tribune in time to see Robeisy Carrazana, the Cuban flyweight, smack Chatacai Butdee from Thailand. Robeisy departed the arena like Apollo Creed, dancing and waving to the Brits who waved back. Chatacai was pretty darn sad and I figured it might be his last fight and he might soon become a banker. The clean and airy house was packed.



I try to see boxing in every Olympics, since I never watch it otherwise and the action is always quick and precise and fantastic. This arena was much cleaner and airy-er than the one in Beijing, which smelled and felt much more like boxing oughta. Here, I expected an oboe recital to break out.



Anyhow, next Andrew Selby from GRB entered to meet Ilyas Suleimenov from Kazakhstan in the next bout and the crowd went nuts. Both little guys were bouncy.



Andrew led after the first round, according to the bright scoreboard next to the two terrific video screens. The crowd was as knowledgeable as basketball fans in Durham, cheering for every point and chanting “SELL-bee, SELL-bee, SELL-bee.” Funny how they don’t chant in a British accent. They went wild when SELL-bee was declared the winner.



I had to dash out to catch the 9:45 red double-decker to Russell Square, which I did only after two of the cute auburn-haired woman gave conflicting directions but a third told me to go down those stairs. I ran down a staircase for the first time since fifth grade, went to the wrong exit, and sprinted across a lawn to hop on the bus just before it left promptly British on time. At 9:45, it was not yet dark.



Trust me, the Olympics is even better than Texas-OU. Actually, the Olympics is about 20 Texas-OUs every day. Being here is an honor and a privilege. Inspire a generation. And mind the gap.
 

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