LONDON 2012: My Story

The application was followed by series of written and oral interviews and then two months of waiting for the background check by the homeland office. Then at the accreditation venue, I had to stand under the scotching summer sun for three hours to get my accreditation card (popularly called PASS). And when it was finally my turn, I was told there had been a (stupid) mix-up in my passport details. My date of birth and my passport expiry date had been swapped with another person’s. The young man that attended to me was kind and understanding and within a few minutes the mistake was corrected but the change in my passport details triggered another round of background check by the homeland office which would take another 24 hours.  Eventually, my accreditation card was ready when I went back 24hrs later but that was just the beginning of the protocol. At the Olympic park gate, I and some others had to stand again for hours to collect the upgrade pass without which the accreditation card was invalid; of course the security was water tight. It took only three hours because our team leader had gone to collect the cards on our behalf. Finally, with the accreditation and the upgrade cards, I was cleared for the common domain area of the Olympic park. It should have been called Olympic village (rather than park) as it’s an amazing and very large sports village. It was so big that you needed a map to navigate in and around the park. The highly spectacular architectural sports venues, the artistic impressions, the technologically advanced facilities, the well paved walk ways, it was just awesome. Then the crowd, by far the largest crowd I had ever seen, there must have been more than one million people in the Olympic park at any given time during the games.  There was a palpable presence of the press crew led by the BBC which had a two-storey structure in the middle of the park housing their live studios.

Then the medals started pouring in. The likes of Usain Bolt, Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis and many others had their moments of glory and euphoria. They had made their preparations; they had run their race and then came their well deserved medals.  Then came the Con te partiro, the time to say good bye, the closing ceremony. It was music-driven, very colourful, well rehearsed...and very emotional. While a lot of athletes left the games with their heads high, a lot of others would always wish they did things differently. But in any case, there will always be another Olympics so...

...See you at Rio 2016. By the way, I didn't forget my camera at home.

By Chidozie Mario https://www.google.co.uk/