felt honour bound to give it a go.
When we got to Victoria Park I was slightly unnerved to find a Health and Safety Officer from Tower Hamlets was just finishing his checks, and it was proposed that I should be the first to launch myself into space.
‘Are you sure you shouldn’t try it?’ I asked one of the fellows who seemed to be running it.
‘No, no,’ he said modestly. ‘We don’t want to spoil your photo.’
The thing was a lot higher and a lot scarier than I had expected, but there was nothing for it. Waving a couple of plastic Union Jacks I lurched off the tower rather fast, and immediately found myself spinning round so that I couldn’t see where I was going. I shot over knots of people in the park and then came to rest some way short of my destination, and about 30 feet up. A crowd formed beneath me as people twigged that this wasn’t part of the plan. I tried diverting them with rousing remarks about how well our team was going to do against France and Australia. Their enjoyment of my position was growing, however, and there seemed no clear plan for getting me down.
The harness was starting to chafe, especially in the groin area.
‘Has anyone got a ladder?’ I asked.
No one had a ladder. At length I spotted my Special Branch personal protection officer, a nice chap called Carl. He had been seconded from his normal job of guarding Tony Blair, and was supposed – I reasoned – to rescue me from embarrassing predicaments.
‘Carl,’ I said, ‘is there anything you can do?’
Slowly he reached into his breast pocket, took out his mobile phone, aimed carefully, and took a picture of my dangling form … The only positive thing you could say about the episode is that at least we gave that zipwire some publicity.
But the truth is that nothing was really going to give the thing lift-off until we started winning gold medals, and they were nerve-wrackingly slow in coming. The great cyclist Mark Cavendish didn’t win his first road race on the Saturday, even though everyone told us that it was meant to be a cert. Then we didn’t seem to be doing quite as well in the pool as we had hoped, and though Becky Adlington swam heroically, she didn’t take gold, as she had in Beijing.
We seemed to be well behind France and Australia in the medals table. In fact we were languishing at about tenth or even twelfth – and the French president François Hollande came over to say something smug about how decent it was of Britain to roll out the red carpet for French athletes to win on.
And then in the middle of the first week, round about the time Bradley Wiggins won his gold in the cycling time trial, you could feel something shift in the general mood – a stirring in the noosphere.
Everyone was becoming transfixed by the sport – even people who had hitherto had no real interest in sport; and the people who were lucky enough to get into one of the venues were reporting the time of their lives. Seb Coe, Paul Deighton and the rest of Locog deserve credit for many things, but if one thing distinguished London from Beijing, it was the punter’s experience – your experience as a spectator.
A great deal of trouble was taken to manage you, psychologically, and to get you going. As you walked into the Olympic Park and other venues you were hailed cheerily by pink and magenta volunteers, some of them waving giant pink hands. They might chant a jovial slogan, or even sing some ditty they had made up themselves. And when you got to your seat, you didn’t just sit there. You were coaxed to enter into the spirit of the thing by energetic comperes. There was thudding music to go with the sport, and any longueur was accompanied by a Mexican wave – often led by the sporty young Royal Couple Kate and Wills, who seemed to be more or less everywhere. There was rhythmic clapping, to the tune of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’, with the entire crowd slapping their knees and then raising their arms like Aztec sun-worshippers.
If that didn’t shatter your inhibitions, you might be asked to mime playing the bongos for the bongo cam, or you might be asked to stand up and dance before a crowd of tens of thousands – or a vast global audience – or you might be asked to kiss your neighbour, male or female, friend or stranger, for the kisscam.
It was a drama in which you became personally involved, and you were allowed to get carried away because of the sense of occasion – that this was a once-in-a-lifetime transformation of the city that might never be repeated. Across London Locog had prepared the most astonishing scenery. Suppose you were in Horse Guards watching the Beach Volleyball. Let’s be honest, most of us had never watched the game before in our lives – I couldn’t have told you the rules, or how many players there are per side. But there we were, surrounded by the old Admiralty, by Downing Street and William Kent’s lovely clutch of eighteenth-century Portland stone buildings – and there in the middle was this thudding sandpit from Copacabana beach, with semi-naked people writhing around.
Each on its own was worth a look, but the sense of specialness was in the combination, the juxtaposition. That struck me as being different from other Olympics – this mixture of old and new that is the genius of London: a city which is never complete but where ancient buildings stealthily acquire gleaming modern neighbours or additions, the interest of each being intensified by proximity to the other.
You went to Greenwich Park and you saw the rear ends of horses bucking high into the sky against a background of Wren’s Hospital, and the towers of Canary Wharf behind Wren’s masterpiece – and the horses jumped to the tune of Van Halen’s ‘Jump’. When the time came at the end of the first week to begin the athletics it was clear that the stadium was a masterpiece of design. Even in the morning sessions it appeared to be (and was) bursting with humanity, and most athletes said they had never heard a noise like it.
With that psychological conditioning, and in that environment, most members of the public were more than ready to enjoy themselves – and then the athletes started winning: the British athletes of whom some of us, in our ignorant pessimism, had begun to despair.
The first golds were taken by the women rowers, Heather Stanning and Helen Glover; then there was Bradley Wiggins; then a farm boy from Dorset defeated the world at shooting – and then it seemed there was nothing Team GB couldn’t win. We weren’t just winning in the kit-intensive sports like cycling, sailing, riding, rowing – all the sports that involve sitting down, as the old joke puts it. British athletes were winning at running and jumping as well – activities which don’t require that much expensive equipment, and where British athletes were taking on the best of the rest of the seven billion people in the world, and doing even better.
There can be no doubt that it was this patriotic feeling – massive group engagement with some individual’s struggle and achievement – that drove the crowd nuts with joy. At the Stadium, the Velodrome, the Aquatics Centre, the vocal support was like a blast wave or sonic shock that seemed to send British athletes faster than the rest. At Eton Dorney the noise from the rowing crowd was like the last trump.
The spectators became deeply engaged in these contests, and often it wasn’t just the athletes who were allowed to shed a tear – win or lose – at the end of their performance. Sometimes even BBC presenters permitted their lower lip to wobble, and sometimes large sections of the audience were in absolute floods. Who says the British are not an emotional people? It became a kind of blubberama.
Soon it became noticeable that the emotional commitment was being extended not just to British athletes, but to all participants. Wild applause greeted any act of sportsmanship, any recovery from a setback. We cheered athletes from France, from Australia, and even Mitt Romney was redeemed (after some incautious remarks about London’s state of readiness) when it was discovered that his wife part-owned a horse in the dressage. A sort of euphoria took hold of the population – as though we had been crop-dusted with endorphins, or Thames Water had added serotonin to the supply. It spread out from the venues via the millions of people watching on TV. In towns and villages across the country pillar boxes were being painted gold in honour of the victorious athletes, and after four years of economic gloom, and exactly a year after riots had swept London and other British cities, a mysterious sense of well-being seemed to descend upon the nation – or at least on the large numbers who got the bug. Sociologists