I had tickets for the men’s 5000m Olympic final in which Mo Farah won his second gold medal. I chose to go to the Edinburgh Fringe instead – and didn’t regret it for a minute!
Like much of the rest of middle(class) England, I got reasonably excited in the run-up to the Olympics – sufficiently so that I applied for three sets of tickets in the initial ballot. I never thought I had a chance to actually get the athletics tickets – they were my wildcard application. I was much more hopeful about the rhythmic gymnastics (little did I know it would be six times oversubscribed) or the BMX (alas, no). Track and field it was in the end, and I was happy with that.
As the Olympics approached, however, I started having misgivings about what was being done to London and to civil liberties throughout the country in the name of Seb Coe and our Olympic overlords. It started with heavy-handed enforcement of sponsors’ brands, murmurs about sponsors’ top executives being given places in the torch relay ahead of people who had genuinely contributed to their community, and even more visible and intrusive “total policing” on my regular trips to London. The tipping point for me though were the Olympic missiles. That was when it became clear that LOCOG and the government were not looking for genuine security so much as enacting yet another piece of security theatre to be able to point at in the event of something actually going wrong. It made me feel both less safe and that I no longer wanted to be part of this.
The Edinburgh Fringe – and more specifically writer Neil Gaiman and musician Amanda Palmer – came to my rescue. They announced a one-night-only show on Sunday August 12th. There was no way I was going to be in London on the 11th and in Edinburgh on the 12th without teleportation, a time machine, or the mother of all headaches. After a quick phonecall to my partner’s parents to see if one of them wanted to pick up my spare ticket, my choice was made.
My attitude to the Olympics changed somewhat with Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, and I spent much of the following 17 days glued to the television watching the most obscure sports which normally don’t get coverage, and watching women’s sports in particular. My enjoyment of the events did little to ease my misgivings about either the security or the civil liberties issues that accompanied the Games, and so I had no regrets when I put my partner on a train south on Friday or even when I watched from behind a sofa cushion as Mo Farah won his second gold medal on Saturday.
Edinburgh in August was its usual delightful self. From mermaids terrifying tourists to people dressed as nuns or only wearing lingerie, it’s a celebration of all things art and all things silly that the human brain can come up with. No long lists of prohibited or restricted items [PDF] here, no corporate sponsorship, no sinister total policing even when the occasional incident did demand police presence. Over four million tickets are sold for the various festivals each year, not even counting unticketed events. The number of visitors to Edinburgh in August equals or exceeds the half a million (sometimes grumbling but generally cheerful) residents. Compare this to London, with its eight million population, 8.8 million Olympics tickets and only around 600,000 visitors, and you get a good idea of the fundamentally different approaches of both cities to hosting world-class events.
As I got on the train back to Newcastle on Monday morning, regrets (other than perhaps over the slight hangover I was nursing) still failed to materialise. I do wonder, though, how much better the Olympics would have been if London took a leaf out of Edinburgh’s book and put sports and fun ahead of corporate sponsorship and security theatre.
This article also appears at the Scottish Times.