The Olympics are just not cricket

The following current affairs column can also be found published by The Felix, the student voice of Imperial College London.  On-line version here: http://felixonline.co.uk/comment/1162/its-all-an-olympic-waste-of-time/

Recently I decided to try and buy my tickets for the London Olympics next year.  I had been in two minds about it for some time—I would get to see some great riding but champing at the bit, I was not. 

As one may expect, tickets are not cheap and of course I want good value for money.  Seeing good horse-and-rider combinations strut their stuff is great, but it may be better value-for-money to invest in training with one of those riders.  However, regarding rickets, as you may well know, one cannot simply buy tickets.  It is a sort of lottery in which one has to register, ask for which tickets one wants and hand over intimate financial/personal details, all in order to wait with bated breath at the prospect of being allocated the ‘requested’ tickets.  It is not clear how the tickets will be doled out and so whether or not any predictive facility for success on this is not known. 

I can easily add to this the necessity of having to use a VISA card to pay for such tickets.  It is styled as a revolting sponsorship deal – and probably is when a verbatim quote from the Olympics website is “We are proud to accept only VISA payments for tickets”.  Apart from the questionable syntax, this does not reconcile with the otherwise rather sensible argument in favour of using VISA for payments, that is currently doing the rounds.  This supporting argument is that due to a unique rule governing the use of VISA accounts, the tickets bought with them cannot be sold on to ticket touts and thus the price not be inflated or used as a vehicle for insalubrious activity.  Of course it is perfectly possible that such a sensible rule and such a nauseating sponsorship deal are not mutually exclusive.  If it were a combination of the two, I think it would reflect well, of oddly, on the organisers. 

Another thing that I have also disliked has been the logo.  Of course, I am not alone in this.  All sorts of objections have been raised – that the meaning of it is not clear, that it looks like something else and is thus confused and confusing, but it is also objective that it is not beautiful.  This may seem fanciful, or even whimsical, but beauty has now been defined objectively.  It is based as it is on numerical proportion and ratia of distances between seen points on a given surface.  A face is a good example of such a surface.  One could of course argue that the very fact that I am writing this is evidence that the marketing strategy, of which the logo is manifestly part, is working.  Crudely, that is true, but what about the tone?  I am not writing about it because it is good, even if it has managed not to be entirely hopeless.  It will be and is being noticed, but that does not make it pleasing, or liked.  It got them attention, but is it the sort of attention that one wants?

Most commentators have been rather negative about the Olympics up to now.  In fact, we are just coming to the end of the period of moaning that boils down to “It’ll be crap because it is in London and not anywhere else”, which is itself a relief.  Perhaps the sort of furtive stubbornness—I wish it were tenacity, but it appears that it is not—we have seen from the Olympic organisers is the result of such attacks.  Boris knew that it was going to be a tough one to organise, and so in order to get it organised without flaking out, he needed the sort of people who were tough enough to get the job done.  The side-effects of having people tough enough to work hard and get things done on time in the face of the British media, and organise the largest sporting event the world sees are a revolting logo, a nauseating sponsorship deal and a peculiar ticketing system.  All the same, I am left with an uneasiness: I cannot help feeling that it is not quite cricket.