The Olympic barge heads up the Thames to Opening Ceremony.
The background
It’s really happening: After seven years of intensive preparation, £9.3 billion, and no small amount of whingeing, admonishments from on high, protest, and scrambling, the London Olympics will be kicking off on Friday night with an Opening Ceremony designed by acclaimed director Danny Boyle.
The Games might not be off to the best start, after Wednesday’s row over the South Korean flag displayed at a North Korean women’s football match.
The festivities began early Friday as a ceremonial barge bearing the Olympic Torch was rowed up the Thames, marking the end of its 70-day journal around Britain and Ireland. Who exactly will touch the Torch to the Olympic cauldron is still a secret, however, as are many of the elements of the Opening Ceremony spectacle devised by Boyle. The Slumdog Millionaire director has said that the show will highlight Britain’s history, its present, as well as its unique sense of humor. This will mark London’s third time playing host to the Games, though it will be the first time since 1948.
So, are Londoners excited – finally?
Boris: Excitement is spreading like a ‘benign sort of virus’
The appropriateness of the analogy aside, London mayor and Olympics cheerleader Boris Johnson declared on Friday morning that Olympics excitement is spreading “like a benign sort of virus passing from individual to individual”, declaring it “unbelievable” as even Olympics skeptics caught the buzz. “I think anthropologists are going to look back at this and ask what is it about this tiny flickering bit of burning gas that somehow fills people’s hearts with such joy?” Johnson told the BBC’s Today programme, according to The Guardian. “It is our chance to show the world what we are all about and our chance to throw a great party.” On Boyle’s Opening Ceremony plans, Johnson said, “I think people are going to well up with hot tears of patriotic pride when they see this thing.”
“Someone asked me yesterday: what face of Britain do you want to put forward? Is it Blur or the Beefeaters? Frankly, it’s both. We’ve got a great past, a very exciting future and this is a great moment for our country, so we will seize it,” declared Prime Minister David Cameron.
David Beckham’s got goosebumps
Britain’s most recognizable sportsman, footballer David Beckham, got into the act with an op-ed for The Sun, declaring, “You can feel the excitement building to a fever pitch wherever you go in the country and I am as excited as anyone…. I know every part of the Games is going to be spectacular and tonight is the night it all kicks off, with the whole world watching Great Britain and the opening ceremony. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.”
Despite it all, London has decided that it is going to enjoy the Olympics. In this world, you can either be with Danny Boyle or Mitt Romney.
— Tony Parsons (@TonyParsonsUK) July 27, 2012
Nope, still sick of the Olympics – mostly
Tom Sutcliffe, however, had no problem raining on the Olympic parade. Writing in The Independent, he declared that he was “utterly sick” of the Olympics, “tired of the corporate bullying that now seems as inalienable a part of the Olympic Games as the men’s 100-metre final”, and “bored with the coercive allusions to national interest and the general terror of being found wanting in Olympic spirit”. But, Sutcliffe relented, there is one reason to call “a temporary ceasefire”: Kathy and Scott Cleveland, two American Midwesterners whose earnest excitement at attending the Olympics went mildly viral on YouTube this week. They are our guests, he argued, even if we didn’t ask them and “and mere courtesy demands that we shouldn’t make them feel bad by banging pots in the kitchen and muttering loudly about what an imposition it all is.”
Kathy and Scott Cleveland are coming to the London Olympics!
More on the Olympics
- Stop whining about the Olympics, says head cheerleader, Boris Johnson
- North Korean flag row opens Games
- From pregnant shooters to moth attacks, the weird world of London 2012
- Top five crazy Games stories
