The Games used to be a highly enjoyable get-together of amateur athletes, but now they have turned into an overblown media circus, with herds of overpaid, tattoo-covered druggies trying to avoid capture whilst making as much money as possible by overacting, screaming, gesticulating strangely before the cameras, and generally drawing attention to themselves.
If that's not bad enough, there's the host nation trying to put on a more spectacular opening and closing show than the previous host nation, simply to show that they can, and at the same time milking their tax payers (over £9 billion in the UK so far).
Did you see the opening ceremony of this latest Olympics? It was a grey and dreary affair, so perhaps in that respect it did reflect well on the host nation. But what about the outfits that the medal bearers and their associates in crime have to wear? Apparenty, these uniforms were designed by students of the Royal College of Art. Well, they've failed their exams, I'm sure! The girls are decked out in a vile purple dresses (it's called "royal purple," but that comes to the same thing, of course), which are festooned with large zips, sometimes open, sometimes not, and decorated with a large flap of material in any colour that doesn't match the purple (so far I've seen yellow, blue, red, turquoise…). What the zips hide is anyone's guess and one can only speculate on the purpose of the flap: I first saw the canary yellow ones during the swimming events and assumed they were to dry the tears of the losers (or winners, for they cry, too), or to wipe splashes of pool water from the walkways to prevent slippage, or to offer a drying cloth to eager photographers whose lenses had become misted, or… well, who knows, perhaps they're simply to polish up the medals before passing them over to their winners? Whatever the purpose of the flaps, they certainly have no sartorial value. And each group of medal bods seems to be accompanied by a behatted individual. I wonder if the millinery is a nod to Carroll's Mad Hatter character, for surely only someone of questionable mentality could have come up with this throwback to the attire of the air hostesses of years gone by. Talking of years gone by, what about the suits and shirts worn by the male of the species Medal Bearer? Honestly, I thought that the Dave Clark Five had been reincarnated, for a more mid-1960s' outfit is hard to imagine?
Somebody actually sat down in a college to design these things?
Sadly, it doesn't end there. Along with the medals, the winners are given a bunch of flowers. Well, let's be honest, "bunch" is too strong a word. I have seen the offering described as a bouquet, but even that is stretching things. Posy. Yes, a small posy is perhaps an adequate description. This, too, was designed by someone, a London-based florist by the name of Jane Packer, in fact. It seems she died during the design process and, by the looks of things, the design process had not proceded very far by the time this unfortunate event took plac. Apparently, nobody bothered to continue it to its conclusion.
Also part of the medal ceremony is the victory ceremony podium on which the medal winners have to stand. It looks more like the cheap base of an overly decorated, ostentatious, middle-class wedding cake than a victory podium. This, again, was designed by students of the Royal College of Art. Another exam failure.
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