Slog and exhilaration, more slog, more exhilaration, yet more slog and yet more exhilaration. After a time, such is the grind that fatigue sets in. The mind and the body say: stop and escape to comfort and relax. The spirit says, persevere and participate – after all, it’s only another few days, and then it would all be gone, for four years, no less.
This is how it goes at every Olympic Games. You come enthused, you get exhausted but then you continually get recharged – by a sporting endeavour that trumps the best one had seen and leaves an indelible imprint, by a volunteer who is as bone tired as one is yet not allowing the smile to fade away, by a colleague who stays gamely engaged despite working against time, his own deadline haunting him.
Above everything else feet hurt. That happens regardless of where the Games are held – Atlanta, Sydney, Beijing or now at London. The newest bugbear is security – and the onus to keep the Games incident-free takes precedence over all else.
At Beijing, the security was a no-nonsense affair. But with their eye for forensic detail, or perhaps out of practice a better nuanced approached, it was not really visibly ubiquitous and overbearing. But the Brits are so absolutely paranoid about terror, and their obsession for security knows no bounds.
Their solution to this, like almost our entire DMG class (perhaps it was passed on to them from the days of the Raj) is to segregate and lock people out.
The consequence is more steel locking people from stepping out of their assigned areas than in perhaps all the jails on this planet locking the criminals in. This translates into walks for miles to get from one point to another, and in between going through unending stairs everywhere – temporary steel bridges erected to provide cumbersome detours – when actually one just intended to go next door.
What indeed is mindboggling is the volume of security once you get into the locked-in areas, your baggage screened and accreditation already checked scores of times, and you still cannot go anywhere close to the athletes with whom you want to converse, chat up with the officials who belong to your country and whose responses are essential to provide insight and depth.
The amazing part is that this is being done to nearly 27,000 athletes, officials and media when each one of them is accredited and security cleared!
But the spectacle is really very powerful. Last night I spent three hours to get to and get back from the Olympic Stadium (since one had arrived late and all seats had been taken, watched it standing with hundreds of other journalists barely able to stand after a long, tough day at the office) for an event that lasted only nine seconds and a bit.
But to watch Usain Bolt thunder out of the blocks and defend his 100-metre sprint crown in the presence of others all eight who were good enough to win gold though only fractions of a second slower and still faster than blinking of an eye was superb.
Bolt clocked his second best time ever, the new Olympic record. Witnessing it from a vantage point was glorious – the whole pack getting out of the blocks at lightening pace and then the winner separated from the second best by 12 fractions of a second.
A moment of exhilaration that would remain etched to memory. And it paid a thousand times back for the pain.
