Olympic Velodrome Death.

Although the news only broke yesterday (7/8/12) on Friday (3/8/12) a 49 year old man died in the toilets in the velodrome at the 2012 Olympic Park. The man, Conrad Readman had managed to buy tickets to Olympic events on every single day of the games leading him to be dubbed the "Olympic Superfan" and having his photograph taken with lots of the stars of the Olympics. Therefore his death was one of those things that would have spread around the Olympic park like wildfire. However having had a quick look at Mr Readman's biography it is clear that he was not in the best physical health and was clearly very emotionally invested in the Olympics. Therefore it is extremely likely that he simply had a heart attack in much the same way that people have heart attacks every single hour of every single day.

That said Mr Readman seems to have achieved the quite difficult task of buying all those Olympic tickets by joining a sort of consortium which brought the tickets from websites across the European Union (EU). Therefore there is a possibility that this consortium set Mr Readman up to die of natural causes in these circumstances. This would have been done for two reasons. Firstly the unmarried Mr Readman had an unusually close relationship with his mother still living with her at the age of 49. I suppose this is a charge that you could level at my father and grandmother whose relationship is a little odd seemingly based on emotional co-dependency and mutual hatred. Secondly the death promotes discussion about the sort of hands-off assassination techniques that people in espionage circles can employ to cause someone to drop dead of totally natural causes. The Brits have repeatedly accused me of using these sort of techniques to kill Christopher Shale - a senior member of the Conservative Party at the 2011 Glastonbury festival which is a little harsh considering I never went anywhere near the 2011 Glastonbury festival and had never heard of Mr Shale until after his death. Of course talking about how easy it would be to kill someone with out leaving any evidence is the sort of thing that will make Olympic visitors distinctly uncomfortable so I should point out the first step in this sort of activity is making the intended victim paranoid so as long as you don't worry about it it won't work.

Speaking of which five members of Cameroon's Olympic delegation have gone missing the presumption being that they will attempt to claim political asylum (refugee status) once their visitor visas expire in November 2012. I actually think this is an attempt to open a discussion with the hosts about what to do with athletes who have finished their events (swimmers being a prime example). Normally these athletes stay on in the Olympic village and basically act as tourists in the host city. However the 2012 games have been carried out in such a climate of fear and intimidation that many delegations have expressed a desire to have their athletes leave as soon as possible. This though would be seen as a major breach of protocol and an insult to the host nation not least because athletes who had left would not be able to take part in the closing ceremony.