Row, Row, Row Your Boat

In any Olympic Games there will exist truly iconic moments, which will leave indelible images in the minds of all those people who attended.  Yesterday I experienced the true privilege of witnessing one of these iconic moments...

...yes, indeed... I was there, in person, to witness the thrilling 0-0 draw between South Korea U23s and Gabon U23s at Men’s Football...  who needs Bolt, Phelps, Hoy et al, when you’ve got Sung-Ryong Jung and Merlin Tandjigora to entertain you?!!  ;-)

Oh ok then – maybe I saw a slightly more iconic moment yesterday.  Maybe, just maybe, I was there in person to witness Team GB’s first Gold Medal of the games.  Let’s have a look at the following video (sponsored by the Steve Taylor academy of quality videos), so that you can see what I saw, sometime around noon yesterday:

This was my solitary trip of the Games to an out-of-town venue, and I left the house yesterday morning at 6:30am to make my way out to Eton Dorney (having only got to bed at 1am the previous night).  I liked Dorney as a venue – of course the infrastructure was far less regimented than at the larger venues, and a lot of walking is needed – a LOT of walking – but this was more than compensated by the spectator experience.

When I bought that ticket, I had a reasonable idea that Helen Glover and Heather Stanning would contend for Gold.  What I hadn’t factored in would that GB would be sat on zero Gold medals prior to the event – I’d assumed that Mark Cavendish would win our first Gold Medal back on Day One, and that that would be that.  So, just 5 days on from the goosebumps moment of the Olympic Ceremony, this was my second goosebumps moment of these Games.

A few other photos of a very patriotic day:

After this, it was on to Wembley Stadium for the aforementioned South Korea U23s vs Gabon U23s match.  This game was, incredibly, attended by 77,000 spectators (five times the attendance as for last night’s Swimming Finals).

This Football ticket was my first purchase from the original LOCOG ticket ballot.  At that time, and before I'd worked out the nuances of purchasing tickets from other EU countries, I didn’t want to miss out on Olympic Tickets altogether, so made a “safe” purchase, for an event where I knew that supply of tickets would exceed demand.  At that moment, it was still “Unknown Team A” versus “Unknown Team B”, and I bought the tickets in the hope that, being played at the National stadium, one of the top teams would be assigned to the game.

A few people have asked me why I didn’t forego the tickets when my ticket-holding sky-rocketed, and it became apparent that top teams would not be involved.  The answer is simply that I was attending the game with my best friends, and this was (at the time) their only ticket for the Games, so I didn’t want to let them down.  Amongst the tickets that I’ve got for the Games, a few are single tickets, whilst for the majority I have attended / will be attending with various friends, and, as you would expect, the latter option is the better experience!

I noticed on Tuesday that I got 100+ hits to the blog in a single day for the first time.  I’m amazed it has even exceed 10+ hits!!

Lastly, and on the basis that I left you with La Marseillaise last time, here, at long last, is God Save The Queen, Buckinghamshire style...  Enjoy......