2012 Olympics: Day 5.

Today (1/8/12) events in 23 different sporting disciplines took place at 23 separate Olympic venues across the UK. Therefore the challenge of every Olympics is always trying to fit everything in. However this has not stopped the hosts of the 2012 games building a rudimentary story arc into the event.

The first act saw the men's and women's road race timed perfectly to follow the Critical Mass cycle ride and the debate about climate change/global warming that was begun by the opening ceremony. The things moved on to sports like gymnastics that appeal to people in the intelligence community and target shooting events that are all about taking a deep breath, centering yourself and then trying to hit the target. On Monday (30/7/12) with concerns about London's public transport system mounting we saw the platform diving events. With everyone calm and settled in on Tuesday (31/7/12) the grappling and brawling events such as judo and boxing began on the day that I was going to do battle my father over shopping and a pub dinner. Wednesday (1/8/12) saw the events that provided TeamGB with their best chances of winning gold medal's in order to convince the public that Britain had won things on the Tuesday. Apart from Wiggin's cycling and Stanning & Glover's rowing golds one of the other things Britain was keen to convince the public that it had won was it's battle with the banks over lending to small businesses. So this morning it was announced that the British Government will be replacing a scheme that saw it basically acting as a credit insurer providing credit default swaps with the "Funding For Lending" initiative that will see the Bank of England print more money and then give it to the banks on the condition they lend it out to customers.

The coming week will see more grappling and brawling events before on Friday (3/8/12) the track and field events start in the Olympic arena. Although I happen to think that these are some of the easier Olympic disciplines everyone else seems to think they are the blue-ribbon events and lots of global VIP's will be attending. For example I've heard Rupert Murdoch will be attending as a guest of the Mayor of London. During this same period the more lenghty events such as soccer, volleyball, handball, tennis etc will be drawing into their final stages with lots of medals on offer. This will be a particularly tense time because without pointing the finger nations may have done deals with each other to affect the outcome of these events. So for example the Kingdom of Made-ups-ville might have helped the Republic of Fictionland win gold in the jiggly-ball in return for the Republic of Fictionland's help in the monkey-tennis.

It is during this period the really weird stuff will start happening. People will start falling off train platforms, cyclists will throw themselves under buses, cars with disconnected brake-lights will suddenly stop in 60mph traffic and strange faults on the public transport system will suddenly appear forcing London Underground (LU) staff who have all signed the Official Secrets Act to have a very tense time trying to figure out if their colleague has simply made a mistake or whether they're actually an MI5 operative As with all forms of terrorism it is the fear rather then the acts themselves that are the important thing. So apart from the reasons already mentioned today's death of a cyclists could be an attempt to make everyone paranoid or the hosts checking it's ok to go ahead with their plan. A key element of that plan is encouraging as many British people to flood London, get drunk and do stupid things in order to make the planned actions of operatives harder to spot and generally cause trouble by sheer weight of numbers. So already the national news have been running stories about how empty London is and how well the city's transport system is functioning while London business owners have been very publicly complaining about how badly their trade has suffered (Olympic Minister Hugh Robertson's provocative comments on the matter are simply a diversion). This has encouraged all the government websites (@GAOTG etc) along with some well meaning people on Twitter to encourage people to come into London by telling them it will all be fine.

Obviously there is no point having a well run public transport system if there is no public to transport so I'm not telling people not to come into London but they should be aware that just because it all worked well this Tuesday does not necessarily mean that it will all work well next Tuesday. So the advice about carefully planning journeys well in advance and avoiding busy periods still applies and will become even more important as the games build to their peak.
That said if you do find yourself queuing to get into an overcrowded station you could just do what I always do and go to the pub or wander around the shops for a bit until it all quietens down. However if you do get drunk please, please stay away from the edge of the platform.

22:50 on 1/8/12.