26 July 2012

No Olympic Atmosphere in "Quite (sic) and Beautiful" Romford

Romford is about 11 miles from the Olympic stadium and it is host to one major olympic team - in the form of chinese journalists who are camped out in a hotel just outside the centre of the town.

It seems that these journalists are rather disappointed at the lack of obvious joy that the games are being held in London.

Only four days towards the start of the London Games, says China Daily the atmosphere here is so different from that of Beijing 2008 that people who had experienced both Games might wonder if it is the same event that is held by different cities every four years.

It is not easy to find many traces of the Olympic Games around the corners of the city of London, except some banners and flags which are more as decorations than as demonstrations.
Four years ago in Beijing, the Olympics became a hot topic for both local media and citizens months prior to the event as Olympics-related stuff filled up every building and street in the Chinese capital.
And tons of thousands of local communities voluntarily gave their help to visitors and Olympians when almost every Chinese city showed its own way to support the host city.
While in London here, the lives of ordinary people are seldom obsessed by the biggest sports gala in the world.

A Chinese website opened on Monday its Olympic headquarter at Romford, dozens of miles northeast of London (err not quite!) , a beautiful countryside where Olympic flavor could hardly be tasted. There is no banner, no paper stories and even a journalist with a credential around his neck could drive some curious glaring of the locals.

"We feel no Olympic atmosphere here in Romford. It's a quite and beautiful place, but no Olympics," said a journalist of the tencent.com, who arrived Romford on Friday.

Around 1,000 Chinese reporters are expected to cover the 2012 Olympics, including the 500-plus squad from the Chinese Central Television (CCTV).  Most of them arrived in London one week before the start of the Games or even earlier.

British media put some Olympic news on the headlines, but their fancy about the Olympics is in a quite reasonable way, compared to the frenzy of Beijing in 2008. The London Olympic organizers had never expected to surpass any previous versions of the Games. All they want is to make a good and sound competition.


And so on. Well London is not Beijing and I doubt we Londoners would care to be corralled into spontaneous events in support of the games. Then again perhaps the Chinese journos didn't notice that 150,000 people turned out to see the Olympic torch procession through Havering (compared with a population of around 230,000 that's not bad a turnout).. I could go on but one thing I did see in this article that I never thought I would ever hear about Romford - the words Quiet and Beautiful. Now that IS a truiumph greater than any by Michael Phelps!

3 comments:

SnoopyTheGoon said...

150,000 people is considered a small local pub in China...don't take it personally ;-)

SnoopyTheGoon said...

P.S. Are you really looking for B&B in Jaipur? I know one...

jams o donnell said...

and on a quiet night!

Ah I left the Jaipur spam. It was harmless