While the world’s athletes limber up at the Olympic Park, Londoners are practising some of their own favourite sports: complaining, expecting the worst and cursing the authorities.
Asked what they felt about the Olympics, a random sampling of people gave answers that included bitter laughter; the words “fiasco,” “disaster” and “police state”; and detailed explanations of how they usually get to work, how that is no longer possible and how very unhappy that makes them.
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“At the end of the day, it’s a pain,” Steve Rogers, a construction site manager, said. Particularly painful, he said, were the subway plans (“absolute shambles”), the road closings (“complete nightmare”) and the fact that instead of creating construction jobs for Britons, the Olympics had provided work for “a bunch of Lithuanians, Romanians and Czechs.”
“We’re looking at something above and beyond the solace and comfort that the British seek in gentle moaning,” said Dan Hancox, a freelance writer. “The Olympics is actively antagonising people.”
On Twitter, Hancox said that for Londoners, “it’s as if someone else is throwing a party in our house, with a huge entry fee, and we’re all locked in the basement.”
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He elaborated. “The traffic infrastructure has shut down to the point where we’re being prepared for a military conflict,” he said. “They’re telling businesses to stockpile goods, advising people to stay at home, don’t go anywhere, don’t travel on the Tube. We have an army on the streets. This is not something that the British people are comfortable with after 60 years of peacetime.”
Worst deal
Many Londoners feel that they are getting the worst parts of the Olympics: the cost, the hassle, the officials telling them not to do things that they normally would. The security company hired by the government at huge expense proved to be wildly incompetent; the Olympic brand managers have made it clear that no one, apart from the official sponsors, would be allowed to appear to capitalise on the Games.
“It’s like living in a police state,” said a business owner, explaining that her company had wanted to start a social media campaign tied to the Olympics but had been warned by lawyers that it would be prosecuted and fined if it used the word “Olympics.”
“'That’s why you don’t see any references to the Games in shop windows or on the streets. People are too scared,” she said.
As for the weather, what if it does not stop raining? Even amid the wettest summer since records began, characterised by deluges and floods, officials keep saying they hope the rain will go away before the Games begin. There really is no contingency plan; the Olympic Stadium, where the opening ceremony is to take place, has no roof.
Waterlogged
Sebastian Coe, the chairman of the Games, said this week that some of the Olympic sites outside London were “waterlogged,” and he urged spectators to wear raincoats and rubber boots.
Should the bad weather continue, even the beach volleyball players will be allowed to change out of their bikinis — one of the things that many spectators appear to like best about them — and into “long pants and/or tops,” officials said. “At the risk of sounding a little bit like a father about to issue their kids off on an outward bound trip, let me make the obvious point that we are a northern European country,” said Coe.
Walking near Victoria station, Linda Vaughn (68) said she was bewildered by the bombardment of seemingly contradictory messages: Welcome to the Olympics, Now Please Go Away.
“We keep getting told to ‘get ahead of the Games,’” she said, referring to the city’s programme for persuading people to make alternative travel plans. “But it’s still a mystery where we’re supposed to go, especially because nothing moves in London on the best of days.” — New York Times News Service 2012