Cycling to Football
In my teens I nearly always cycled to football at White Hart Lane. When I returned last night, I don’t think that would have been possible. Or at least I couldn’t find anything on the Spurs web site.
Wouldn’t cycling to football be a good idea? Clubs could also make a charge for a bit of security.
If you take Ipswich Town, they have a bit more space than most and I’m sure that they could provide parking for a couple of hundred or so bikes with ease.
I’ve just looked up Ajax in Amsterdam. They have sheds for 3,000 bikes. It would also appear that the Olympics in London will also encourage people to cycle to the games.
Winter Olympics
I haven’t actually watched anything live at all, despite the fact that I’ll sometimes watch things like Ski Sunday on BBC.
Perhaps the time difference to Vancouver is just too great.
Disorganised and Unfair Olympics
The Winter Olympics in Vancouver have come in for a lot of criticism. I’m not going to be too outspoken, as we have the Summer Games in London coming up, but it does strike me that the Canadians have made some fundamental mistakes, that with hindsight could have been avoided.
They could have done nothing about the lack of snow, unless of course they could have found a way to move Europe’s and the United States’ unwanted snowfalls to where they were needed.
But to me one thing stands out. The Olympic flame is the centrepiece of any Games and they have surrounded their’s with a fence, that obscures it to the public. They say they were worried about vandals and the like, but it would not have been beyond the wit of the designers to protect it with say a moat and a low safety rail. I suspect if they’d asked the keeper of the monkeys at Vancouver Zoo, he would have had a much better idea!
They got a lot of others things wrong, like the finances, but then they did in Montreal too.
I would also criticise them for giving their own competitors more time to try out the tracks and courses, in the hope of winning more medals. I hope we don’t adopt the same attitude for 2012 as Games should be remembered for fairness not cheating.
But lastly, I will criticise them for one small thing, that would have been so easily overcome by a small amount of replanning. The medal ceremony for the ladies’ skeleton bob was held at three in the morning UK time, which was an absolutely wonderful idea for a once-in-thirty-years event for the UK. As it was 24 hours after the event, they could and should have scheduled it for a convenient time for the UK’s news networks.
But then they had expected a Canadian to win!
As I have said many times before, all major projects and events are often judged by the attention to detail by the organisers. Canada has failed with the details.
London 2012 must take note. According to this blog on the BBC, they are!
Olympic Progress
This is the new Olympic stadium rising above the ground.
The Olympic Stadium Rises
As I got on the A12 I got a good view of the new Velodrome.
Both looked to be making good progress.
Victoria Park
Coming back from Brands Hatch, I needed a walk and a visit to the loo, so what better place to do this than Victoria Park in Bow.
I got a short walk, but the toilets were closed, as that had probably been vandalised. So I had to leave.
I have many fond memories of Victoria Park. When we lived in the Barbican, our children used to go to school near the park and we’d take them for walks afterwards. Years later, my son lived with his wife near the park and we’d walk again and later with our granddaughter.
There used to be a lido, but that closed in 1990.
It is a park worth visiting. Remember that it is within walking distance of the 2012 Olympic site, so it will be a lovely place to take a picnic before going to the Games.
Rebuilding King’s Cross
Nearly all of the transport projects for the 2012 Olympics in London are now in place. The last one is the rebuilding of King’s Cross.
The station will be opened fully by 2012.
Dover to St. Pancras by Javelin
Javelin is the code-name for the trains that will be used to shuttle passengers from central London to the Olympic site at Stratford.
You might expect that these trains are still on the drawing board or at best in some factory somewhere being built. But no! They are up and running daily down the High Speed One line and then on to Dover and the Kent Coast.
So what do I think of the Javelins.
They are excellent and when compared to the Eurostars that run to Paris and Brussels, the build quality is better. But of course they are people movers and have no catering, although I thought the leg room might have been better. I also timed the Javelin at over 120 mph.
So will they fulfil their Olympic role of moving people from Stratford to Central London. I timed that part of the trip at about six minutes!
So overwhelmingly they will!
Incidentally, this winter the Eurostars have been having all sorts of troubles with snow. I asked a train conductor, whether the Javelins have had any problems. He said no!
Three Years to the Olympics
It is now three years to the Olympics. My spies tell me that the project is really on budget and on time. Why my spies? Because, I wrote one of the original project management systems and some of those guys we trained and worked with are still in contact.
I think though we underestimate how much the Olympics will be worth to East Anglia, the area where I live. The night we won the Games, I was at a dinner at Anglia Ruskin University. Someone had calculated a figure of a large number of hundreds of millions of pounds.
So don’t knock the Olympics.
I Was There!
There is an old Max Boyce song or tale about Llanelli beating the All Blacks, 9-3 in 1972. Upwards of 50,000 Welshmen claim that they were in Stradey Park that day, when the figure was probably around 20,000.
My only real “I was there” moment was that I was in Trafalgar Square on July 6th, 2005, when London won the right to hold the 2012 Olympics. I was on the steps of St. Martins-in-the-Fields and I have the pictures to prove it.
So how many fervent Welshmen will claim that they were in Cardiff, when England played their “Get Out of Jail Free” card yesterday. Read Tom Fordyce for an excellent piece on how the bowlers batted out a draw. I couldn’t possibly claim it was a well-deserved draw could I? But then it is always worthwhile to rub an Aussie’s nose in it.
I listened to the story unfolding in the car between Dunkirk and Rotterdam, not on the BBC’s Test Match Special on Long Wave, but the regular Five Live broadcast, with Mark Pougatch, Alex Stewart, Jason Gillespie and Pat Murphy. It was nail-biting stuff. Not that I do that anymore.
At one point, I went through a tunnel and there was cheering on the other side. Had England lost a wicket? No they’d scored a four. Everything was cheered and even after a dot ball, you’d think that England had won.
So it was all great fun! But I can’t agree more with Jason Gillespie, when he suggested that a bit of pace, rather than two spinners might have blasted one of Anderson and Panesar out. But then that is just a what if!
Panesar, like all good Sikhs, showed his honourable fighting qualities and has given the selectors a real dilemma. They probably need to drop one of the spinners, and he would have been the most likely, as although they both bowled badly in Cardiff, he is the lesser batsman.
But can they drop one of the heroes of Cardiff?
The Olympic Stadium Rises
I drove past the London 2012 Olympic Stadium on the way to Dover to get the Norfolk Line ferry to Dunkirk. That may seem an illogical way to go, but if there was a serious accident on the M25, I’ll miss the boat.
London Olympic Stadium Rises
Not much there that’s visible yet, but then most of a building is underground and in the framework. The site appeared very busy with lots of cranes and equipment. But as it was Sunday, there was only a small number of people. That in itself is probably a good sign, as they’re not late yet.
The Anonymous Widower 