Our First Olympic Event

Tuesday, 31 July

The long awaited day! And the weather report is dire. Rain. Heavy rain predicted for much of the day.

More than a full year after the arcane lottery for tickets that involved paying for tickets before you were told what tickets you were buying. And since the payment could only be made with a VISA card, sponsor of the Olympics, meaning a debit rather than a credit card in this part of the world. So the trick was to  keep an appropriate balance in your current account to cover the unknown payment which would be debited without warning. When £64 was debited we knew we had 4 tickets for events at the senior citizen £16 price. A month later the e-mail message arrived saying, yes we had 2 tickets for Beach Volleyball and 2 tickets for Diving.

The tickets arrived in large cardboard envelopes by special delivery-signature required postal service. Along with our tickets were instructions to anticipate dire transport and security problems necessitating arriving at least two hours before the start time. Well our start time was 9 a.m., and Horse Guards is usually a pretty quick bus ride from Hampstead. After our pleasantly easy weekend travel through London, we decided to ignore the warnings. Our tickets gave us seats for two men's matches followed by two women's matches, and we thought four hours of Beach Volleyball might be one hour too many, so we decided to skip the first match, take the bus, and hope for the best. Well whatever fairy dust magic the organisers have managed to sprinkle over the city, we arrived and had passed through "airport style" security in less than an hour.

The Mall entrance to Horse Guards Parade.
Buckingham Palace and the Victoria Monument is at the far end.

The stadium erected for Beach Volleyball in the Parade Ground
behind the Horse Guards Headquarters

We still decided to skip the 9:00 match to have coffee and see what else was on the site.

Mega Beach Volleyballers

A sand sculptor sculpting a model of the Horse Guards Parade.

A completed sculpture of a Horse Guard

We added Beach Volleyball to our ticket preference list because we were intrigued by reports the event would be held at the Horse Guards Parade which does not in any way resemble a beach in Santa Monica. Santa Monica might have the Pacific Ocean, but Santa Monica doesn't have Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, or the London Eye.

And it didn't rain either. In fact at 10:10, according to Big Ben directly ahead of me in our high rise seats, the sun even came out for a minute or two, and the Beach Bunny dancers came out to do a Sun Dance!

And Mayor Boris Johnson dropped by to tell a political joke that Gordon Brown approved the £9.5 billion for the Olympics because he was looking forward to watching Beach Volleyball from the back windows at Downing Street. And to tell an Olympic joke that as the host country we are graciously allowing our guests to take the gold medals.

Mayor Boris Johnson with his blond head of hair . . .

. . .  and on the big screen

The matches were very good too. One of the Brazil players in the men's match is rated number one in the world, I think the announcer said. The Brazilians easily put the Swiss men away in two sets. The Spanish and Argentine women were more closely matched, but Spain took the match with two sets. The Brazilian and German women were fiercely competitive, going to the third set, after a second set that stretched to many extra points. Brazil did win in the end.

We were efficiently and briskly moved out of the venue to allow the afternoon ticket holders to enter. The food kiosks and Olympic merchandise kiosks were shut to discourage any stragglers.

Then it was back to nearly empty Trafalgar Square for the bus ride home.

Our next tickets are for the Olympic Park in Stratford so I expect the crowd and security warnings may be worth heeding.