The 2012 organisers appear to be masterminding a vast operation with the eerie efficiency of the Sith lords in Star Wars
There is a quote beloved of earnest young sportsmen, and the coaches shouting pick?me-ups at them through a loudhailer: "Life is not a dress rehearsal." It was, apparently, coined by the author Rose Tremain, who should have got a better copyright lawyer: if she had claimed royalties every time that phrase was spouted by ageing rugby players giving motivational talks to South Korean businessmen, she would be living in a house built of gold leaf and black truffle.
I would be willing to bet that there is not an athlete alive who does not have Rose's credo scrawled somewhere in their training diary or, if he or she is an endurance athlete, tattooed to the inside of the eyelids. Which makes me wonder how the swimmers, cyclists and other assorted Olympic hopefuls have rationalised the 2012 test events of the past few weeks. This summer is, in fact, nothing but a dress rehearsal, a practice run for the giant school sports day that descends on us next August.
The Olympic testing programme has been unfurling with a quiet precision and understated efficiency since May, such that the number of events that have already taken place, from modern pentathlon to mountain biking, would probably surprise you (apparently there was even a trial of Wimbledon as the Olympic tennis venue ? it was called the All England Championships and won by a Novak Djokovic).
They've silently hustled their way into an already busy sporting calendar and popped up at just the right time to remind us that there is another Britain, one that isn't sweary and violent and dangerously out of control; one where we cheer human endeavour by watching lasses braver than us splash about in the Serpentine.
For those of us used to seeing London's infrastructure quit at the first sign of stress ? snow, heat, Tube strikes ? it is a bizarre experience to see the Olympic prep run so smoothly. Like most sceptics, I assumed the test events were put on to uncover the inevitable, catastrophic oversights on the part of the organisers. I fully expected, for instance, the White Water Centre to have been accidentally plumbed in to the hot-water pipe, and that halfway through the three-day eventing, the horses would complain about the standard of the hotels in Greenwich and demand to be moved. But there have been no embarrassing logistical failures; no last-minute realisation that some poor engineer has spent six months bolting on Zaha Hadid's wavy roof upside down.
This fortnight alone the basketball arena has opened without a hitch, the beach volleyball went ahead in spite of the riots, and the geese failed to molest the swimmers in Hyde Park. There has been heartening British success for the sailor Ben Ainslie and the cyclist Mark Cavendish. We have even lost to China at badminton, making this dress rehearsal as close to the real thing as we're going to get. The London organising committee appears to be masterminding an unnervingly vast operation with the invisible, eerie efficiency of the Sith lords in Star Wars. By next summer I will be surprised if we don't see Darth Coe patrolling the Olympic Park with a light sabre.
Nothing less than Jedi mind control can explain the success of the London-Surrey Classic last weekend. If any event ought to have prompted a 2012 backlash it was this one, because road cycling is surely one of the worst spectator sports invented. You stand on a kerb for hours, and just as your feet are threatening to sue you for cruelty, a blur of colour flashes past.
That's it: you spend the rest of your time asking your clueless neighbours who you saw, and fruitlessly searching for the result online via a patchy 3G signal. When the Tour de France came to London in 2007 I remember the high point being the caravan dispensing free Haribo before the race. Yet last Sunday, without a single Tangfastic in evidence, the Mall was lined with enthusiastic souls clutching Thermoses, as if Kate Middleton herself was fronting the peloton. And, frankly, she could have been ? you really can't tell who is in that British jersey when it speeds by at 40mph.
It's been an utter coup for Coe. Still, there is a downside. As any theatre actor will tell you, stage lore dictates that a good performance requires a bad dress rehearsal, and things may be going just a touch too well. We could do with a few slip-ups ? basketballers proving too tall to walk through the doors, the "wrong type of mud" at the BMX, an overeager health-and-safety steward snuffing out the Olympic flame. Boris, over to you ?
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