I was in Cardiff yesterday afternoon. For those that don’t know the geography of the City, the stadium is bang in the middle of town. This makes it a great venue on match days, you can’t help but get swept up in the whole thing. Wide shopping streets lead to the stadium and have a good selection of pubs, bars and eateries all with outdoor seating to capitalise on the equatorial weather patterns.
The grip on not allowing any form of Olympic branding, no use of key words or phrases and trading standards wandering the streets looking to stamp on anybody doing anything was impressive. So impressive, that I had actually forgotten there was a game on. Other than directly outside the stadium gates where there was a mascot (some sort of fox or bear for some reason) posing for photos you wouldn’t have known the Olympics were in town on that day.
That’s got to be an error? They should be encouraging shops to theme up their window displays surely?
As for schools being given free tickets, I’d love to know what schools. I’ve got friends that are teachers all around Cardiff and the Vale, about 10 different schools in a 12 mile arc around Cardiff. None know anything about any free tickets. Perhaps that’s why there was a 15,000 no show. Somewhere there’s a head masters desk with 15,000 tickets shoved in it and a post it note with ‘to do’ written on it.
I suppose the peripheral events are just that, peripheral. The majority will be in London, natch, and I’m sure there’ll be no mistaking the games are on. Certainly the number of 2012 branded BMW’s on the M25 should be a big clue. It was funny on Tuesday, got passed by the usual quota of BMW’s containing a single suited office type. I’ve got used to that over the last few months. What was different this week was as well as the suits in Beemers, there were groups of people in sportswear, crammed into Minibuses and Fiats. British cycling appear to be travelling in a fleet of Fiat Bravos. I think that reflects something of the Olympic ethos.
Don’t mean to be negative, the BBC are doing a great job of promoting this and I'm going to get into it. It’s just my personal experience is slightly meh!