TSDOAL2012OV – Overcrowding or Undercrowding?

As the Olympics have progressed, the thing that has oft been pointed out by observant Londoners is the relative sparseness of most of the city, as people have had the luxury of walking down Oxford Street in a straight line, cartwheeling through Covent Garden and skipping through Leicester Square as if it were a Swiss hillside, albeit a very square and level one. The reason for this is simple: LITERALLY EVERYONE IS AT STRATFORD.

In my media centre home, I am often afforded the privilege of breathing space, but on exiting my little haven in the corner of the park I am suddenly immersed in so many people that I can’t help but worry a little about whether there is enough air to go around. It is a jungle out there, an unforgiving one at that, where an inability to jerk from side to side like a souped up dodgem car will render you incapable of getting to a toilet, let alone to one of the three water fountains in the whole park.

Yes that’s right, three water fountains.

I am a big fan of the olympic park as an inanimate construct, but one fairly evident oversight is the startling lack of water fountains. There’s no joke coming up here. Hydration is a serious business.

One of the more enjoyable parts of the Olympic Park is “Park Live”, a giant valley for people to sit on with a big two-sided screen in the middle on which to watch events. One novelty of this is that the screen is about 3 seconds behind real life, meaning that when watching an event which is in the park, you can generally hear what has happened from the crowd noise in any given arena just before you see it on the screen. It is most evident when watching hockey, played in the arena nearest to the screen, as it is fairly obvious whether a goal has been scored before it has even happened on the screen. This generally doesn’t bother me because hockey is really just football with a stick, a ridiculous concept really, and therefore is of no importance whatsoever.

I decided to indulge myself and watch a lot of the big athletics finals on the screen, surrounded by the atmosphere of the thousands of people watching the big screen. It’s an enjoyable spectacle, but the highlight was undoubtedly a comment by a 12 year old to his dad minutes before the 100m final. The boy had obviously made the same astute observation that I had, which is that there were around 4.8 billion people in the Olympic Park, and had consequently realised that as the last event of the night, the immediate aftermath of the 100m would see the carnage of every single one of them attempting to leave out of the same exit. The boy thus hatched a genius plan to avoid the crowds, and it is this genius I leave you with – the best way to avoid the crowds after the Olympic 100m final:

“Dad…Why don’t we just leave halfway through?”