What a games! I have such good memories of watching London 2012 and Rio 2016 was a superb performance from Team GB. In comparison, Tokyo 2020 was a little deflating because everything was on in the middle of the night and you would just wake up to see what happened. So, when Paris rolled around and back in our kind of timezone, I cleared my schedule to watch.
In fairness to the organisers, they were brave in trying to do something different with the opening ceremony. But it wasn’t my favourite part. The athletes parade is long enough when they are walking, let alone when you put them on a barge. And stuff needed faster cuts. That horse was running down The Seine for like five minutes. Just get Danny Boyle to direct it next time.
The water quality in The Seine was also an issue. But people in glasses houses and all that. The UK struggles with water pollution and there were similar problems in Rio.
Everything else was brilliant. The venues were beautiful. It was right in the heart of historic Paris. The Eiffel Tower was ever-present and made for some amazing finish lines. And world records were broken in a slow pool. I tried to take in as much as possible. At one point with the gymnastics on the TV, golf on my laptop and road cycling on my phone. I was pretty Olympic-fatigued by day 14.
Overall, we can be really proud of Team GB. Seventh in the medal table is a low finish for us. Japan is arguably on a post-hosting bounce, and similarly France were the hosts. But we would want to beat Netherlands and Australia. Some things just didn’t go our way with Josh Kerr, Matt Hudson-Smith, Beth Shriever, Beth Potter, Kimberley Woods and others narrowly missing out on gold. And it would have been great to see Kate French try to defend her title. But there were plenty of success stories, too: Alex Yee and Tom Pidpock both made amazing comebacks. Bryony Page smashed it, Keely Hodgkinson was a dominant as everyone expected and Nathan Hales set a massive new Olympic record in trap. Also, Toby Roberts is Spiderman.
So, despite being seventh, if you rank it in terms of total medals, we’re third behind the US and China. We have one first place, back in 1908 but by Atlanta in 1996 we were down to 36th place with just one gold and 15 total medals. Compare that to 14 golds and 65 medals in Paris. The BBC has a good breakdown. Many of our Olympic athletes are trying to fit training in around working full-time. When we fund British athletes, we unlock their potential and we win medals.
It’s a shame that Discovery+ own the rights. The BBC’s coverage of London 2012 was much better, whereas Discovery+ has consistently bad service and technical problems.
Two weeks until the Paralympics. We’re consistently the second strongest nation in the Paralympics, after China, so let’s hope we can keep that streak going.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 13th, 2024 at 11:00 am and is filed under Distractions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.