Ghosts of an Olympic summer ...

On September 28th I wrote a posting about the Olympic aftermath on Blackheath and in Greenwich Park. There were still lots of leftovers then! I quoted my short description of after the Games in The Boy with Two Heads, to point up the differences between the ancient Games in Olympia and our London 2012.

On January 15th, I went again to see how the clear up had progressed. I walked across the Heath and into the Park. The bridge over the busy A2 ...

... is long gone, but its footprint is still visible. 

The Heath outside the Park walls now shows no sign at all of the tents and fences used by the competitors and, later, by the de-struction teams that dismantled the bridge and the stadium.

The Equestrian Stadium ...

(from the official London 2012 website

... took a while to disappear altogether. Its footprint ...  

... is now shrinking. The year has turned and soon the grass will grow back.

But I'll never forget the roar of the crowd and the thrill of the Games. What a summer it was!

Olympic aftermath - Greenwich Park

Back to life without a deadline - at least for the moment - and I walked around Blackheath and Greenwich Park the other day to see how things have changed since the end of the Paralympics.

In The Boy with Two Heads I mentioned the end of the Olympic Games of 432 BC:

"There was still a lot of traffic on the road, but most of it was commercial. The tourists had left by land and sea the minute the Games were over. Tents had disappeared overnight, leaving the riverbanks bare and dusty, except for piles of rotting rubbish and lines of fetid latrines."

In London in 2012, the transformation is going much more slowly and carefully and, as far as I know, there are no fetid latrines to deal with. But there are complex plans for the Olympic Park, which will be called the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And in Greenwich, the residents will be glad to get back to using their own Park as they used to, much as the excitement and glamour of the Games was appreciated at the time.

During the Games, Blackheath itself was a cross between a fun fair and a cinema.

Now it's just the familiar old Heath.

While the Games were on, there was a huge footbridge over the A2 main road. It was the route for pedestrians from Blackheath to Greenwich Park. In normal times getting from one to the other is merely a matter of crossing at the pedestrian lights and walking through the main gate of the Park.

But for the Games, the Bridge was the southern entrance to Greenwich Park and the way in for the Equestrian Arena. The gates at each end of the Bridge were closed unless there was an event. The view from the top was impressive, especially as it was from a place that is normally in mid-air.

Now the bridge has almost all been dismantled.

And in the Park itself, the Equestrian Arena is being taken apart, girder by girder.

It will probably be Christmas before that area gets back to something like it was.

There is still a long blue fence beside the flower garden and other fences preventing cars from using the main road through the Park.

But the Observatory is open again ...








... and there are various workers going about their business.

But, as in The Boy, most of the 2012 athletes and spectators left almost immediately the Games were over, if not before. In Ancient Greece, Olympia was basically a religious centre that was visited by a constant stream of tourists and suppliants. It seems that the local people wanted to get back to that business as soon as they could. And of course, they were well-practised in cleaning up after the Games. They had to do it every four years.

Olympic impressions, vol 3

Many of my impressions seem to be similar to those recorded by visitors to the Ancient Olympic Games.

Happy faces!

London felt like a different city during the Olympic Games. (Perhaps it still does, as the Paralympics haven't finished yet.)

On the buses and trains you could tell who was off to the Games by their happy faces. The volunteers who directed us around the venues, helped us find loos and places to eat, and saw us on our way afterwards were usually smiling. And they teased, sang, danced and joked, so that we too always had a smile on our faces. Even the army was cheerful and chatty.

Excitement!

At the events I went to, the spectators cheered British and other athletes alike, and we waved, and chanted, and stood up to urge them on. 

Skills!

I watched beach volleyball, trampolining and athletics live, and judo and gymnastics and diving and boxing and lots more on television. I was awestruck to see people so skilled, so practiced, so highly trained, and so dedicated to being perfect.

 

Media

Greenwich Park: spot the camera!

And I learned a little about how the media get their amazing shots.

(in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts)

Taken by Yair Haklai in 2008, St Petersburg

No cameras in Ancient Greece, of course. In those days the media consisted of painters and stone and bronze sculptors. Most of the visual records of the Ancient Olympics that have survived are in stone or are painted on vases. Bronze statues, of which there were thousands, were made with the cutting-edge technologies of the time. Themis, the hero of The Boy with Two Heads, learns some of them during the story. Sadly the vast majority of large bronzes have been melted down - often recycled as weapons ...

(If you've been following my blog, you've seen this wrestlers picture before.)

Olympic impressions, vol 2

Apart from inside the venues, there was lots of colour in the Olympic Park.

Some was in the building ...

(photo Wikipedia)

... and some in the planting.

These thousands of meadow flowers reminded me of my spring visit to Ancient Olympia, where I saw carpets of anemones and daisies.

And they had planted themselves!

I imagine that in April 432BC, when Themis, the hero of The Boy with Two Heads, arrived there, the whole area would have been bright with multi-coloured spring flowers. He would have seen them gradually die back as rain became scarce and the summer sun dried everything up (unlike in London this year!), so that by the time the Games started in early August, all the flowers would have disappeared.