Hi everyone,
We are nearing the end of the
year, and many people take that time to draw up lists of their favorite albums,
movies, or songs of the year. I used to do this as well, but the last couple of
years I haven't really bought an awful lot of music, which would necessitate a
list. In fact, these days, I can't come up with 5 new CDs a year, and the
ones that I do buy are mostly obscure Ramones bootlegs, so that does not
require a list either.
No, what I decided to do
instead is make a list of the 5 things I liked most about this year.
This, for me, is more
interesting than telling you which movies I liked (Rock of Ages was really good
though) because that is all rather subjective and wouldn't amount to much.
So, without further delay,
let's have a look at what made me tick in 2012.
5. The London Olympics.
London is one of those places
that, as an avid traveller, you get to, for some reason or other, about
once a year. Sometimes for a couple of days, maybe to watch a match, or maybe
you're just passing through an airport on your way somewhere else. This
year, however, I did not set foot on London soil, if I remember correctly. And
this year, more than any recent years, there was a very good reason for going
to London: the Olympics were in town. The first summer Olympics that I really
followed were the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984. I had seen the Sarajevo Winter
Olympics earlier in the year, which is also why it was so special for me to
visit the Sarajevo Olympic stadium when I was there last year. I have
intently watched every Olympic Games ever since. I just love it. There's sport
on TV every day, all day, everybody follows it, even people who don't normally
care too much about sports, and I even find myself watching sports that I
wouldn't normally even consider watching, like rhythmic gymnastics or rowing.
The Olympics are always a
happy time for me, and it starts right at the opening ceremony, where I can
play my favorite game: Guess the Flag. If you are obsessed with maps and
geography like me, this will keep you happily occupied for a couple of hours.
During the 2008 Bejing Olympics, I spent half an afternoon in a local pub near
my dad's house, where I played Guess the Flag with one of the locals, a guy by
the name of Henny, who used to drink there with my dad when they were growing
up and, well, he probably thought that if it ain't broke, he shouldn't fix it,
so when my dad set off to get a career, a family and a mortgage, Henny stayed.
When I relayed this story to
my dad, he looked at me with a look that said "I can not even start to
imagine how you could possibly have fun doing something as trivial as
that"
There are 2 things that stood
out for me in the London Olympics: They were very happy games, without any
major incidents. There were no kidnappings, no bomb attacks, no security
issues, nobody boycotted the games and they were very well organised. What also
contributed to this feeling is the fact that, for the first time as far as I
can remember, the organising committee had actually thought through what they
were going to do with the facilities after the games had ended. Most Olympic
facilities, you see, are basically left to rot. There is a website that has
pictures of abandoned Olympic facilities around the world and it is not a
pretty sight. The Barcelona Olympic stadium has no present use. Nothing happens
there. The one in Sydney gets 1 or 2 games a year thrown in their direction by
the Australian Rugby Union, but that's about it. The Sarajevo stadium sat idle
for years and then were lucky to find out that a local team (FK Sarajevo)
needed a new ground so they moved the team there. The one in Amsterdam was used
for football games for about 2 decades but has now been redevelopped as a
business centre. The pitch is now a park, with a fountain in the middle
of it. The only Olympic Stadium that I know of that is being used in any
meaningful sense, is the one in Atlanta. After the games they tore down half of
it, and it is now in use as a baseball park. So in that way the new London
stadium is quite unique in that it was already known that it would be used
every week after all the paperwork had been done, as the new home ground for
West Ham United. In fact, 3 teams were in the running for the ground, but it
appears that West Ham has won the race, much to the detriment of local team
Leyton Orient who now fear that having their big brother around the corner,
they will loose support as people will go visit West Ham in the Olympic stadium
instead.
What was also a
novel experience for me, is that I watched pretty much the entire games in the
USA, which gave the whole enterprise an entirely different feeling to watching
it in Europe. As you will know, American news focuses mainly on American
issues. You can watch CNN for 3 hours in the safe knowledge that
probably not once, you will encounter a news item that is set outside of
the US, or is not connected to American interests elsewhere. This more or
less works for sports coverage as well, and I don't just mean that they call
their national championships World Championships, even though there are never
any none-American teams involved (The only exceptions being 1 Canadian
team in the NBA, and about half a dozen Canadian teams in the National Hockey
League)
Don't get me wrong- I love
American sports broadcasting. It is always accurate, exciting, up to date and
stuffed full with statistics, an area of expertise I am especially fond of.
American sports on tv are always a party. However, as I said, it always
focusses on Americans first and foremost, and the rest of the world later. If
you watch an Olympic event on, say, British television, they will try to get an
interview with the winner first. Later on they will focus on British athletes.
In America, it is the other way around. The first thing you will see is the
American athlete that came in 5th or 6th and after that they will focus on
periferral characters like Usain Bolt or Jessica Ennis.
And that brings me, in a
roundabout way, to my personal favorites of the London Olympics: Jessica Ennis
and Katie Taylor. Katie Taylor, a girl-next-door from the Irish town of Bray,
just South of Dublin, took part in the boxing competition and was,
realistically, Ireland's only real chance of a Gold Medal. Fortunately, she
delivered, a feat which sent the entire nation into frenzy. Streets, parks and
even a brand of beer were named after her in the aftermath of the games.
My personal favorite,
however, was Jessica Ennis. A bright and sparkling girl from Sheffield, who was
a pleasure to watch during the heptathlon and was justly rewarded with a Gold
medal after winning 6 of the 7 events. I have never seen an athlete who looked
so happy and the fact that she stayed really down to earth when every paper and
tv show in Britain wanted to see her makes her all the more special.
4.
I was going to write something about the demise of a certain football club in South Glasgow, but as I want to end the year on a positive note, I have decided to focus on a different football matter.
WE BEAT BARCELONA
WE BEAT BARCELONA
WE BEAT BARCELONA.
It sounds really good, doesn't it?
Okay, one more time:
WE BEAT BARCELONA!
3. The Irish came home.
American Football is getting
ever more popular in Ireland. More and more pubs are picking up on the interest
and start advertising that they're showing all the games. The thing is, other
than the Woolshed, they only show the games on Sky, which means that if you
really want to see a good selection of games, The Woolshed is where you want to
go.
This story, however, has
nothing to do with pro football as such, but with the news I picked up early in
the year that a big NCAA football game was to be held in Dublin. What made it
even more interesting was that it involved the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, a
team with strong Irish links and massive support among Irish Americans.
For those of you unfamiliar
with the NCAA, it is the governing body for college sports in the USA.
And
college sports in the USA, are BIG Business. Really Big.
Let me give you some figures about how big it is. During the half time break of the game in
Dublin, they held an on-field interview with the General Manager of Notre Dame
and, when asked if he was impressed with the sell-out, 53.000 crowd, he
said the crowd was amazing but they were used to big crowds as Notre Dame
Football ground has a capacity of 81.000 and has sold out EVERY GAME SINCE
1964. 81.000. That is a bigger stadium than all but 4 stadiums in the whole of
Europe, and that is just for 1 college team. Teams in the Southern states often
have considerably bigger stadiums. The Michigan State Wolverines, up North, I
was astonished to find out, have a stadium that holds a whopping 108,000 people.
That is 2 Aviva Stadiums put together and then some. It is also the largest
sporting venue, capacity-wise, in the world that is not used for racing.
And it's not just spectators. American Universities regularly publish annual
merchandise turn-over figures that have teams like Manchester United and Real
Madrid scratching their heads, wondering what the hell they are doing wrong. As
you will understand by now, college sports are Big Business.
So it was with
some excitement (A lot of excitement, really) that we learned that the Fighting
Irish would be playing Navy in Dublin in the first weekend of September.
Getting tickets would be a nervy and tricky business. The stadium holds 53.000
but due to the Irish-American connection, many Fighting Irish fans from the
States would be eager to make a holiday out of it and see Ireland, perhaps
even trace their ancestral roots. So when the date came around that the tickets
would go on sale, I was wired and, 10 minutes before the on-sale time, I
unplugged my phone at work and picked a bunch of papers from my desk that
I had especially put aside to look busy while I was getting my hands on
tickets. After 10 minutes of nervously refreshing my browser window, I finally
got to the covetted 'On Sale' screen and, having pre-entered all my details,
managed to get 2 great tickets right behind the press-section. Filled with joy,
I walked into the hallway to inform Renae that we were in, and when I returned
2 minutes later, I refreshed my browser again, only to find SOLD OUT on the screen.
We were very happy indeed.
In the run-up to the game, I
regularly checked the Notre Dame websites to see if there was any news to
report, such as the awesome notion that Notre Dame would be wearing boots in
the colors of the Irish flag during the game. It was then that it started to
dawn on me how massive an occasion this was. I checked the website of the
Official Notre Dame travelling agency. The notion that a school has their own
travel agency would come across as preposterous here in Europe, but in the USA it
is apparently quite normal. Their website proudly stated that they alone had
sold over 9000 tickets for the game in Ireland, 3600 miles away. 9000 people,
to give you an understanding of the size of the operation, is 20 transatlantic
Boeing 747s filled to capacity.
That's impressive.
Apart from the online stats,
Dublin itself transformed completely in the weeks before the match. As many
Americans had made a holiday out of it, and spent 1 or 2 weeks in Dublin or
Ireland at large, everybody wanted a piece of the action. Pubs started showing
baseball at night and ESPN during the day. Menus were hastily modelled after
the Hardrock Cafe and TGI Friday's. There were American flags literally
EVERYWHERE. At times I wondered if I was walking through Temple Bar or
Gatlinburg. The atmosphere was great. I was lucky enough at the time to have
some time off work, so I spent many a happy afternoon taking in the scenes of
American tourists tracing their Irish roots, drinking Guinness and taking
pictures of the banners that said 'WELCOME HOME TO THE FIGHTING IRISH' that
were all around town. It really was quite awesome. With game day only days
away. excitement reached fever pitch. All pubs were packed with Americans and
American Football enthousiasts like me, and we all had a great time. I walked
into a bar in Temple Bar(not something I do that often) on the Friday
afternoon before the game, wearing a New York Mets hoody. I ordered a beer and
within 5 seconds an American down the bar asked me how life in New York was.
When I explained that I was not from there, he found it so amusing that locals
followed American Sports that he bought me my next beer, and the one after
that. To milk the situation, I then showed him my tattoo of the flag of
California, which triggered another couple of free pints. But other than the
free beer, the whole atmosphere in town was great. Everybody was having fun and
all was well in the world.
The author at the game
When game day finally came
around, it got even better. Merchandise for the teams was sold everywhere,
Temple Bar, the official tailgate venue for the match was one big street party
and every pub in town was packed to the rafters. It looked like St. Patrick's
Day. When we got to the stadium, we found that we had the best seats in the
house, directly behind the press section. We had a brilliant view of the pitch
and all the action. The pre-game show was amazing, the band alone must have
been consisted of over 100 people. The game was great, the halftime show was
amazing, especially a choreographed move from the band, where they first
filtered out in the shape of a Shamrock and then in a map of Ireland, which
sent everybody into a frenzy. The weather was perfect and oh yeah, Notre Dame
thrashed Navy by 50-10. It was a brilliant day and a very special occasion to
be part of. I will remember it for the rest of my life and wouldn't have
missed it for anything.
So that was part I. I will reveal my other highlights of the year next week.
Cheers,
Lennard
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