The Spirit of London. Boris Johnson
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it struck me as a benign mental contagion, a bit like the sentimental affliction that hit us after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, except that this time it was positive.
People would start up conversations on the Tube – and no one assumed they were mad. One woman turned to a City Hall official, without knowing who he was, and said: ‘I want to know who I can write to, to thank for it all.’ It became obvious, in short, that we had a monster hit on our hands, far bigger than any of us had expected.
The things that were supposed to go wrong had not gone wrong. The transport systems all worked fine. More people hired Barclays bikes than ever before. The cable car took more than a million on high, to see the sights of East London, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, who pronounced the view of Canning Town ‘very nice’. The Tube carried record numbers of people – about 4.5 million per day – with more or less metronomic efficiency. The Jubilee Line worked so well, in fact, that members of the ‘Olympic Family’ abandoned their claims to the so-called Zil Lanes and took public transport with the rest of us.
Athletes flashed their medals at fellow passengers. The Rwandan team were seen at a bus stop. When David Cameron took the Tube he was thanked (very properly) by a member of the public for his role in helping to make it go faster. The IOC president Jacques Rogge took the Docklands Light Railway and pronounced it excellent. London transport got every single athlete, politician, bureaucrat and journalist to his or her destination on time. More or less.
Having given us all such a fright, the G4S staff started to turn up in droves. The security operation was masterminded by thousands of military personnel and they all – including the police – did such an effective job that I didn’t hear of a single serious delay in getting into the venues.
As for the weather, it performed a complete somersault, and for more than two weeks it remained good to fair: maybe a bit overcast at times, but perfect for a garden fete. It turned out that the tourists had not entirely fled London, and those that came spent more than in previous years. Crime fell by a further five per cent.
And the things that were meant to go right went spectacularly right. It helped that the Team GB athletes were so nice and well-balanced. Many commentators drew the contrast between the modesty and work ethic of these relative unknowns, and the behaviour of professional footballers.
It also helped that the quality of the sport – not just the British contribution – was superb. Good old Usain Bolt. He not only came to London and ran 100m in the second fastest time in history. He ran faster than he had in Beijing. Then he won the 200m as well, becoming – arguably – the greatest athlete in history. Then he and his Jamaican colleagues went on to obliterate the 4 × 100m world record. He fully deserved his night of relaxation, or whatever it was, with those Swedish volleyball players. London set 27 world records across the board, from weightlifting to cycling to the women’s 4 × 100m sprint to David Rudisha’s astounding 1 minute 40 in the 800m; and that was important. This Olympics wasn’t just a big moment for Britain. It was a big event for the world, a moment when humanity collectively pushed out its boundaries.
But elite sport is for the very few. Only a tiny fraction of the top one per cent will have the talent and the application to become Olympic athletes, let alone medallists. The ethic of the Games is stark, Homeric: an all-or-nothing competition that ends in the glory of success or the dejection of defeat. And so for many people the true spirit of the London Games was shown not just by the athletes, but by the volunteers – the 70,000 Locog Gamesmakers, the 8,000 Team London Ambassadors.
They were there to show that everyone could participate, that 2012 belonged to us all. They democratised the Games. They had something of the Butlin’s Redcoats in their chirpiness, and they steadily acquired their own heroic status in the minds of the public, and for many of them – as they repeatedly told me – it was the best and most exciting thing they had done in their lives (and the same is true of many of the rest of us). They may have temporarily mothballed the pink and magenta livery, but many of them will be hoping to do something like it again.
By the end of the Paralympics, it was as if nothing could go wrong; or rather, people no longer seemed to mind it, whatever went wrong. We took the Javelin home after the Paralympic Opening Ceremony. This turned out to be a mistake, since the service was reduced, and we waited for about two and a half hours in a crowd of thousands. Under normal circumstances I reckon I would have been lynched. But no: the mood was so outstandingly charitable that I found myself being thanked.
One day towards the end of the Paralympics I was walking through the Park, and thinking that it was even more packed than it had been during the Olympics. The sun shone on happy crowds as they thronged over the bridges. Families played in flower-filled meadows. It was like some ancient vision of Elysium, and I thought, look at this lot.
Talk about value for money.
By the end of the Games we had paid for major improvements to London transport; we had built thousands of new homes; opened the biggest new green park in Britain for 150 years and were well on the way to regenerating large parts of East London. We had beamed positive images of Britain around the world and filled people with a general sense of togetherness and love-your-neighbour. What else is politics for? If you reckon that the £9.3 billion has been spent over the best part of ten years, it must rate as one of the best investments by any government ever.
We learned all sorts of things about London and Britain, truths that we had half-forgotten. After the shambles of the Dome in 2000, we discovered that we could after all put on a great show, and deliver a big and difficult project – and hosting the Olympics is the single biggest logistical feat you can ask any country to pull off, short of going to war. That is an important lesson for all the cynics who wonder whether we have the capacity to deliver the new infrastructure projects the country so badly needs (a new hub airport springs to mind, or a new generation of nuclear power stations).
We saw the importance of making the public and private sector work together, and the Games were a triumph of collaboration between some very bright officials and some of the cleverest businessmen I have ever met.
We saw how this country and much of the world has changed for the better, in our lifetimes. Saudi Arabia fielded their first female athlete. British women took the centre stage, and in some ways eclipsed the men. ‘Jess Ennis is so cool,’ I heard a thirteen-year-old boy say. He didn’t just mean that he fancied her, though maybe he did. He meant that she was remarkable, admirable, a role model. That is a development.
The Paralympics were by common consent the best and most dramatic ever staged, with their own stars and record-breakers. It would not have been possible, in my childhood forty years ago, to imagine huge crowds of Londoners cheering with passionate sincerity and acclaim at a contest between athletes with prosthetic limbs. That is also a development. Yes, I am sure that Tanni Grey-Thompson would tell me there is still a long way to go, but progress has been made.
In the exuberance and generosity of the reaction, the Games also brought out something of the character of London. It is in many ways an English city. It has quintessentially English pubs and gardens and heavenly parks. It has whistling builders and fatalistic-looking passengers sitting on top of heaving red buses; and suburban shopping arcades with garish vinyl signs advertising curry or fried chicken; and softly swearing taxi drivers; and church bells that still toll on a Sunday morning from 150 beautiful steeples that rise over the familiar granite and yorkstone pavements spangled with rain and vomit from the night before.
London is the capital of England, of Britain, of the United Kingdom. But the Olympics reminded us that it is also a global city.
When those teams of athletes arrived this year, there were 50 nations who had home teams in London of more than 10,000 each. There is no other city like that, save possibly New York. In that sense the Games were a metaphor – or an extension – of the function London has played over the last few centuries: the arena, the stadium, the venue where talented people can come and compete, and make their name.
In the enthusiastic response of that London crowd – the vehement (and amazingly unaggressive) British patriotism that was shown by people from all races and backgrounds, we saw how the city takes people in and makes them its own. This is the