Achievements

I had a pleasant weekend in Southampton despite feeling rather under the weather before I drive down there on Friday night. We spent quite a bit of the weekend watching the Olympics, but we also went to the Spinnaker Tower, which I really liked and we had great view of the South Coast.

I was really impressed by our performance in the Olympics and getting to third place in the medal table was quite some achievement, although I imagine it won’t last. But we came up trumps in sailing, cycling, rowing and swimming, which was great. I was particularly impressed by Rebecca Romero who won a silver medal rowing in 2004 and has now won a gold in cycling this time. I did feel really gutted for the women in the quad sculls who got the silver. Whilst normally a silver would be great, they so desperately wanted the gold and when they were interviewed after the race you could just see how shattered they were by missing out. You can see the interview here.

We did also win a bronze in gymnastics, which was our first in about a century. Apparently Louis Smith had two ambitions in life (he’s only 19 so hopefully he still has more…) and one was to win an Olympic medal. The other was to become King of Jamaica. Well the Head of State is Elizabeth II, as in our monarch and so he might have to add “stage military coup” to the list in order to achieve that, as it doesn’t tend to be the sort of thing you can just apply for. I think we can conclude that he thinks big though.

As much as I like the cycling events, some of the ones in the velodrome are very weird. The keirin, for example, is about riding around behind a guy on a motorised bike and then after doing a few laps he goes off the track and the cyclists race each other. You can watch a video if it here. Weird.