Today at 8.12
BST the BigBong kicks off the countdown to tonight's opening ceremony and the
start of the Games.
London has been transformed with overseas representatives creating pop-up hospitality
facilities and TV companies setting up pop-up studios anywhere and everywhere -
Denmark TV (will Sarah Lund be one of the presenters?) even featuring a Lego
version of the Olympic Park. Olympian teams and BMW official courtesy cars are
everywhere. My insider reports that the opening ceremony will truly reflect Great Britain, a spectacle not to be missed.
Did I say BigBong? There I go again, mixing fact and fiction. I'll leave the final words of fiction to Ian Fletcher, Head of Deliverance at the Olympic Deliverance Committee and his handover speech, reproduced below from an interview in the Daily Telegraph earlier this week.
From this morning onwards this is for real. Let the Games commence...
"Well, here we are at the finishing
line. Which, as so often in life, is of course where the starting line is. So
that’s all good. And what a journey it’s been to this point.
It was a tremendous shock for all of
us when we were awarded the Games back in 2005 – I can still remember the look
on Kelly Holmes’s face now. But we recovered. Those of us who stayed on
regrouped and we dug deep – quite literally of course in the case of the
Aquatic Centre – and the really great news there, by the way, is that the leak
is now basically controllable, so we’re controlling it, which is another big
positive to take out of this whole thing going forward.
If these Games are about one thing
then it’s not just Sustainability but also Legacy. But, of course, they’re
about much more than one thing, more even than two things. They’re about many
things, each one uniquely central to everything we’re about and everything we
do. Who would attempt to say where Inclusivity ends and Diversity begins? Only
a fool. And as we all know we don’t have time for fools in the Deliverance
Team. Look around you.
Yes, there have been problems along
the way. Of course there have. But in Deliverance what we like to say is that
problems are solutions waiting to happen.
So let’s not be afraid today to
acknowledge what it is that we’ve achieved. Seven years ago there was literally
nothing. Now there’s definitely something. And we delivered that something out
of that nothing.
Let us take that achievement with us
going forward towards a future beyond Deliverance, wherever that actually
means. So thank you to each and every one of you and I suppose what I’m really
trying to say is that basically, it’s all good."
