Gold! SG mini Olympics is coming. Look out...

GOLD! I was in Australia (as a buckaroo) for the Olympics and lots of neighbourhoods had local events: sporting, musical, criminal etc. It was an eye opener for a young priest I can tell you . Now it's happening here. Hurray.

The Tollington family are in full 2012training like the Von Trapps running from Hitler and our neigbours are renting our their flat for the duration of the games to a Bavarian TV crew. So it's gonna be BIG.

This is such a sporty district tho we don't have much green space, Finsbury Park aside - and that is booked out for official 2012 hospitality and police dog training camp. What should we do for the Olympics? And more to the point, given the piles of expected dog shit - where?

It could be that people will be shagged out by then as the Jubilee festival will be massive around here given the vibrant ethnic mix, republican flaccidity and surplus of hairdressing establishments. But surely we should make the Olympics a golden memory our grandchildren will remember when their rotten teeth fallout in the 2090s and we are long gone?

Comments

  • edited 10:20AM
    Legend / coke head
  • edited January 2011
    I think it's the alpha course rather than coke.
  • edited 10:20AM
    My suspicion too.
  • edited 10:20AM
    I wish the stupid wedding and the stupider Olympics would fuck off and leave us alone.
  • edited 10:20AM
    I sympathise, though at least with the Olympics it's been the spur for a lot of transport and other construction investment.
  • edited 10:20AM
    ...and a lot of evictions of valuable community businesses, facilities and long-standing residents. And a lot of suspicious fires in properties on suddenly valuable real estate, which haven't been properly investigated.
  • edited 10:20AM
    Fascinating. Do you have a good online source for discussion of that?
  • edited 10:20AM
    There's been a lot of bits and pieces since, but the best single summary I've seen remains <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/iain-sinclair/the-olympics-scam">this Iain Sinclair rant from the <i>LRB</i></a>.
  • edited January 2011
    I can only recall my happy days as a buckaroo in Australia and I was so struck by how the games brought everyone together and boosted pride, infrastrure, as well as selling shed loads of koala merchandise fueling cheerful Aussie capitalism (I still have cupboards full of these Koalas - ah happy days!).

    Likewise in Barcelona, there are motorways which were only built because of the Olympics - sadly they are hardly used now but the Spanish have always prefered trains for longer journeys. But you get the point. I'm looking forward to cheering Spurs in their new Stratford ground in 2013 (and the junior Tollingtons, passionate members of Junior Spurs are also very thrilled). Without 2012 we would still be in the shit hole that is White Hart Lane - imagine that!

    Face it. When the country is poverty-stricken and there are sever cuts depressing everyone isn't it at least good that we have the 2012 treats to look forward to and take our anxious minds off our present troubles?
  • edited 10:20AM
    And that we have to pay for it as well.
  • edited 10:20AM
    Exactly - that money could have been spent on...well, almost anything else would have been preferable. Instead of White Hart Lane, we get White Elephant Quadrant. And when the damn thing actually hits, we get massive disruption (in Atlanta some businesses shifted hours so that the people who actually lived and worked in the city wouldn't get in the way of the obviously-much-more-important tourists).
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  • edited 10:20AM
    Hell yes. I do have my issues with the Chap (I don't like the way they take people like Huysmans and Baudelaire, who were provocatively modernist, and then present them as a sepia-tinged antidote to a modern world whose technologies &c both men would have found fascinating) - but they attract some very dapper crowds and the events are far more relevant to my life.
    (I might respect competitive sport more if they weren't such authenticity bores. Allow drugs, cybernetics, whatever, and you'd have a proving ground for the superhuman, which would interest me. As is...which unaided normal human can throw a thing furthest? Why should I care?)
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  • edited 10:20AM
    Have you read The Perfection Point, ADGS? I too have little interest in sports, being built for glamour rather than speed but I love the Chap Olympiad. It's great fun and I'd recommend it as a day out for the people watching and dressing up opportunities if nothing else.
  • edited 10:20AM
    I hadn't even heard of it 'til your post, but it does look moderately interesting. Although I'd mainly be interested in noting his proposed maximums in order to crow when someone breaks them.
  • edited 10:20AM
    There will be a meeting at the Mortimer on friday at 7.30pm to discuss first thoughts for the 2012 plans including festival activity and road closures on the opening weekend (lorne, regina etc).
  • edited January 2011
    only two people turned up and they were from Charteris Road and raving to get 'the party started' down there - which looks quite possible for the wedding so we assume the Olympics will be a shoe-in. They had lots of ideas about speed trials etc, I must admit I glazed over after an hour. Anyway, overall, we can only assume the questionnaires give us a reading of local views (mad keen) and the council (gagging to get a bit of Olympic magic and their greasy hands on funding) will push ahead. One grey haired woman, from Lorne road was sighted but kept a very obvious distance. Honestly.
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