The Games by The Times: Great Britain’s Finest Sporting Hour

Introduction

Simon Barnes

LONDON WAS its usual cranky self. If there was anything unusual in the air, it served only as an opportunity for whinging; London, being old and somewhat stiff in its joints, has long believed that grumbling is a basic human right. Signal failures on the tubes, intrusive, unfair Olympic lanes on the roads, the influx of over-excited foreigners in curious patriotic garments and the continuing bloody awful weather: no good could come of it.

I travelled to the Olympic Park in just such a London on July 27. I travelled back to my hotel through an enchanted city at the heart of a magical land: Oz, Utopia, Erewhon, Narnia, Camelot, the Never Never Land, the country of the Houyhnhnms, the land at the end of the rainbow, the island where dreams come true, a brave new world, an island full of sweet sounds that give delight and hurt not. Even the weather wasn’t too bad.

And there, the following morning, I discovered that I had helped to write not The Times of London but The Times of the Emerald City: a newspaper utterly changed to reflect these changing times, one that told not of war and horror and disaster but of the dawning of a period of magic. The paper was now wrapped in a single vast, beautiful photograph. The times were beautiful: The Times was beautiful. I set off for Greenwich Park and the horses.

What sorcery could work such a transformation? Love, obviously: only and obviously love. London had spent seven years being wooed by the Olympic Games and had been difficult to please, seeing only the defects of a too-ardent suitor. Seven years had passed since London was awarded the Games: seven years of bitching and moaning and refusing to see anything good, save the grudging admission that the 100 metres might be quite interesting. For the lucky bastards who had tickets, anyway.

Overnight everything changed. After this ardent but one-sided courtship, London and Britain fell without warning, fell like a ton of bricks – and the next 16 days were full of the euphoria of love requited. Each day was a day of fresh wonders: each day that followed was filled with the certainty of greater wonders to follow. The only thing that was better than yesterday was the still greater glory of today.

There is a terrible thing called disaster-shock that affects the victims of nightmarish occurrences: a complete overwhelming of the senses and the will. Something of the exact opposite affected those of us who were at the centre of these extraordinary 17 days. As one impossible day followed another, an increasing sense of shock worked its way through the members of Team Times. Many of us were staying at the Hotel Russell in Bloomsbury, from where we could cross the road to catch buses (in those suddenly quite acceptable Olympic lanes) to all the Olympic venues. We had no organised social life and there was no carousing, for there was no time, but occasionally we would meet up by accident, sometimes in twos and threes, sometimes in spontaneous groups, and have a drink or a plate of not terribly demanding food at the next-door Italian.

‘Each day was a day of fresh wonders: each day that followed was filled with the certainty of greater wonders to follow. The only thing that was better than yesterday was the still greater glory of today.’

(Tower Bridge cover) Press Association

(Flyover cover) Getty

(Table Tennis cover) Getty

(Bolt 100m cover) AFP

(Nicola Adams cover) Action Images

(Opening Ceremony cover) Marc Aspland/NI Syndication

(Wiggins cover) Graham Hughes/NI Syndication

(Bolt cover) Marc Aspland/NI Syndication

(Bolt 200m cover) Reuters

(Lizzie Armitstead cover) Bradley Ormesher/NI Syndication

(Canoe Slalom cover) ProSport

(Equestrian cover) Kit Houghton

(Synchronised Swimming cover) Empics

(Gymnastics cover) Getty

(Cycling cover) Getty

(Chris Hoy cover) Marc Aspland/NI Syndication

(Marathon cover) Imagosportfoto

And always in this mood of disbelief, this strange feeling of being in a place and a time in which all the normal rules had been suspended. We were all a little more affectionate to each other than normal. We found ourselves talking more openly than is usual among colleagues: about our own lives, about our feelings, about what we were experiencing, about what we were a part of.

We were journalists stripped of the carapace of professional cynicism. We didn’t feel like dispassionate observers, refined out of existence, paring our fingernails, reporting on the events with detached calm. We felt part of a miracle. There was an unaccustomed warmth in what we wrote. There was also a sense of risk: don’t ever be afraid of going big. Not while it still lasts.

We were, after all, on the biggest story of our lives. We were writing about a Home Games: none of us will do that again. This was the moment to play your big shots, to play the innings of your life. It was a feeling that gave us a certain empathy with the athletes. True, we hadn’t worked for four years with nothing else in view but one single day: but as we sought to raise our own games to the highest possible level, we got the general idea.

It was astonishing to get up every morning and pick up The Times, shoved brusquely under the hotel door, and behold a thing of beauty. Every day of the Games was a day out of the common run of things: every day brought a newspaper to match.

A journalist, like any other employee, is more inclined to whinge about their employer than to lavish praise upon them (see paragraph one). But for this magical period, that daily first sight of the newspaper was a thing to glory in. And once you got past the lovely wrap, the newspaper was all about us: no political knavery, no international horror could shove sport – silly old trivial old ridiculous old sport – off the front pages nor cause the diminution of the 40-page Olympic pull-out.

We had dressage on the front page of The Times. That day, I felt like retiring at once from all horse-writing, for surely I will never top that. The Times afternoon editorial conference was interrupted not once but twice so that the Times’ high-ups could watch Charlotte Dujardin and Valegro doing their stuff in the dressage arena.

That’s what it was like at The Times: that’s what it was like for the entire country. Every day we fell in love with a new way in which humans sought glory and perfection. The country was lit up with passage and piaffe, split-times, heptathlon points, pommel-horse dismounts, stroke-rates, jumping penalties, the dive tariff, double trap, the exact worth of a kick in the crotch at taekwondo, the difference between snatch and clean-and-jerk, the problem of controlling pulse and respiration in modern pentathlon.

And then there was Usain Bolt, who performed the most essential job of all at the London Olympic Games. The glory of Bolt has nothing to do with nationality. Bolt’s scintillating run in the 100 metres reminded Britain that it wasn’t just about us: that this great festival was an international thing, a celebration not of London and Britain but of brilliant individual humans and of all humanity.

We were not the winners: we were the hosts. We weren’t conquering the world: we were the grateful recipients of the world’s blessing. On the night of the 100 metres final, I wrote the splash – jargon for the front-page lead story – in the stadium and the following morning the nation was still rapt and The Times was wrapped in the wonder of Bolt.

For the rest: well, it’s all in here, as told by me and my colleagues, in words and in pictures. Much of the glory of the Games was in women: and day after day we celebrated women not for their winsomeness but for their strength of body and of mind, and if I had my pick of what sporting legacy we want from these Games, it’s that women and women’s sport get higher up the sporting agenda.

I shall close here with a journalist’s story. I was back in Greenwich Park and had just finished 1,200 words on the eventers and the British silver medal for the sports pages. I now had to write a further 800 words on Mary King, the British heroine, who, aged 51, had set the tone for the British effort. This was for page three, on the news pages. And I was at a loss.

I’ve known Mary for years: brilliant, delightful, courageous, ever-so-slightly barking. But I wasn’t sure where to start this latest tale, and so I took a walk outside, away from the tensions of the press-room to see if I could find an opening paragraph – an intro, in the jargon – in the colonnade outside. And found Mary. She was passing by, and her smile was like a supernova. So instead of wheedling a quote from her, as journalistic practice demanded, I told her she was wonderful and kissed her. ‘Feel my medal,’ Mary said. It was a great solid thing, a chunk of metal that said something serious about glory and its pursuit.

That kiss and the fondling of the medal gave me an intro, a free and generous gift from the gods of sportswriting, and it was a moment that encapsulated everything that was perfect about the London Olympic Games of 2012. It was a blessed time: and we were there. If any of that sense of being blessed has survived in the words and the pictures that follow, we have given a true account of the most extraordinary period of all of our professional careers.

‘This great festival was an international thing, a celebration not of London and Britain but of brilliant individual humans and of all humanity.’

(Closing Ceremony cover) Getty

(Opening Ceremony dance) Marc Aspland/NI Syndication

Friday, July 27: London opens up

It was a ceremony that only a filmmaker could conceive. From a pastoral idyll rose smoking towers and clanking machinery while brave volunteers climbed chimneys or stripped away the green fields.

(Opening Ceremony Industrial Revolution) Jamie McPhilimey/NI Syndication

WHEN DANNY Boyle unveiled his vision for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in June, there were those who greeted the announcement with something between a sly smirk and an outright guffaw.

There was no shortage of columnists, commentators, self-appointed online experts and harrumphing letter-writers pouring scorn on the plans. Sheep? Morris dancers? Village cricket? Didn’t Boyle know that most of us live in cities and do not pine for some long-lost and largely imagined rural idyll? It would be a toe-curling embarrassment and confirm the suspicions of the world that this is a land trapped in a cycle of nostalgia.

‘It is hard to remember any public event that so united the country in admiration as the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games.’

At a little after 10pm on Friday July 27, as Boyle’s ‘Isles of Wonder’ spectacular came to its breathtaking end, no one was laughing, unless it was Boyle allowing himself a grin of satisfaction at having pulled off such a spectacular coup with such utter brilliance.

It is hard to remember any public event that so united the country in admiration as the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. Yes, there were wild flowers, milkmaids and a thatched croft, but there was also an extraordinary recreation of the birth of the Industrial Revolution (complete with Sir Kenneth Branagh dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel reading lines from The Tempest), a tribute to Britain’s contribution to children’s literature, featuring J. K. Rowling and 32 floating Mary Poppinses, and a moving, stunningly choreographed celebration of the NHS.

(Opening Ceremony chimney) Scott Hornby/NI Syndication

(Opening Ceremony Team GB) Marc Aspland/NI Syndication

And that is not to mention Mr Bean’s contribution to the Chariots of Fire theme and the showstopping appearance of the Queen making her acting debut alongside James Bond in what will remain without question the defining image of the start of London 2012.

The much-debated issue of who would light the flame was handled with equal flair – from David Beckham’s Bond-like speedboat dash down the Thames from the Tower of London, to the handover to Sir Steve Redgrave to