Radio Australia Today Editorial

Olympics. It’s Over. Now the Bus is Coming.

25 August 2008

London celebrated like no-one else when it won the right three years ago to host the 2012 Olympics.

Deja vu. I remember the euphoria when Sydney won the Olympics back in 1993. One journalist said it well when she said: We’ve got the Games. Now we’ve got the work.

London knows that feeling right now. Sports centres are to be built, or at least reconfigured. Trafficways have to be reorganised. Athletes accomodation has to be set up. There’s a lot to do in four years.

But it wasn’t that long ago that England proved it had the ability to do masterful things. The second world war devastated London. Food production was destroyed, infrastructure gone. Many people were dead.

Compared to that, the Olympics will be a cakewalk.

Oh, and did you hear the Mayor of London make his extraordinary speech in the handover ceremony last night? I thought he was hilarious. Sure, there were plenty of groans at his puns and wordplays, but in the end he showed that London is going to take a fun attitude into these Games.

After all the splash of Beijing, perhaps that is the only place London can go. There is no way it is going to out-Beijing Beijing. These were the biggest Games. A kinda sports equivalent of James Bond film Moonraker. The Bond producers were smart enough to realise that having taken Bond into space, there was no way the film could continue to get bigger. The series needed to be brought back to earth, which was what they did with the next film. It was smart decision.

I have a feeling that London might be wanting to take a lead from the Bond producers. Let’s hope they do, and ignore the inevitable push to out-do Beijing, and instead bring it back to earth to make their Olympics Opening ceremony about the athletes, not the egos.

Well done China, by the way.
– Phil