LONDON—The Opening Ceremonies of the Olympic Games on Friday has focused the world’s attention on a 2.5 square-kilometer area east of London that once was nothing but an urban eyesore.
The Olympic Park was unveiled on Friday night in a cinematic spectacle, not quite the promised “greatest show on earth’’ but still worthy of all the James Bond and Mr. Bean movies combined.
Seven years ago, the area was a blighted and polluted wasteland—the sludge of the Industrial Revolution that Friday’s Opening Ceremonies ironically tried to celebrate. It took an Olympic effort by Sebastian Coe, Britain’s middle distance running great, and other leaders of the London’s Olympic organizing committee to rescue the land from decay and turn it into the center of the universe, at least in the next fortnight.
Still, devoid of any architectural marvels in the mould of Beijing’s Bird’s Nest or of the ancient heritage of the Games to make up for its lack of aesthetics in Athens, the fenced-off Olympic Park remains an eyesore.
According to the media guide of the Opening Ceremonies much of the Olympic Park was once difficult to access and visually marred by overhead power lines, derelict buildings and piles of rubbish.
Today, Olympic Park is a tangled mess of metal and concrete structures fortified by high wire fences that have turned the area into a veritable fortress. The Athletes’ Village, itself a fortress within a fortress, is a cluster of unremarkable structures. Many of the venues, like the hockey and BMX tracks, are a tangled mess of scaffoldings holding up the grandstands—obviously temporary structures to be dismantled like Lego pieces and torn down after the Games.
The Aquatic Center is of a unique design. From the outside, it looks like a sea gull about to spread his wings to take off. Indoor, under the bird’s body, is the 50-meter pool and under its wings are the spectators who can look down on the pool but cannot see the stands across them.
The velodrome, shaped like a warped coin or flying saucer, looks imposing and impressive. But the basketball area looks like a poor imitation of Beijing’s Cube, where Michael Phelps electrified the world with his eight-gold medal romp four years ago.
The centerpiece Olympic Stadium is the biggest eyesore of all. Inside, the excitement of the action on the field and in the tracks can always distract spectators from its ugliness. It was spectacular during the Opening Ceremonies, especially when the fireworks made the arena look like the bejeweled crown of Queen Elizabeth.
But from the outside, the stadium looks like an unfinished construction project with cranes, steel cables and other metallic structures sticking out of its roof.
Next to the stadium is a structure called the Orbit. From the early maps of the Park, the thing looked like roller coaster tracks soaring high to the sky. The Orbit is supposed to be a sculpture, at 115 meters the tallest work of art in Britain. But from afar, it looked like the perfect platform for the cauldron on which the Olympic flame would burn during the Games. Many had expected the torch relay to finally end at the stadium after David Beckham’s water-borne dash down the River Thames and culminate in the lighting of the flame that would slither up and around the roller coaster track and onto the top of the Orbit.
But it was not to be. The cauldron finally showed itself in an even more dramatic and spectacular fashion in the middle of the stadium and left the Orbit holding bag and staying on as the abominable structure it wasn’t meant to be.
And so the Games are on.
On the first full day of competition on Saturday, American swimmer Ryan Lochte gave the world a glimpse of things to come by winning the first of his anticipated duels with the struggling Michael Phelps, who faded out of the medal in the men’s 400- meter individual medley.
Now, let’s forget about aesthetics; the real “greatest show on earth’’ has begun.