So the UK won more medals than ever before. Well ever if you don’t include 1908 which forevermore will be known as the British Cheating Olympics where we made up most of the sports and the competitors at the Olympics. But the question on everyone lips here at FT is, did Pete manage to avoid less that fifty nine minutes of it. If we are discounting the opening and closing ceremonies (which we are, because its my game with my rules) then the answer is YES. I only got another three minutes of tedium in over the weekend (OK four if you count the replays of a British woman kicking someone in the head in the Tae Kwon Do). So my final Olympic Avoidance Time works out at less than 51 minutes, and a new Personal Best.
And yet. I feel like there has been more Olympics around. Clearly this is the problem of success, the news clogs up with Super Saturday, Super Sunday and other days where the word super is less alliterative. We managed to annoy the Australians by being better than them (despite lacking the moral high ground of having a smaller population). The Australians manage to annoy us by saying that all our medals were in sports where we get to sit down and are almost correct. Everyone is nice about the Chinese and ignores their human rights violations much like you pretend to have fun at your racists grandfathers 80th party. We worried about Boris Johnson being a knob. Somethings at least don’t change. But with the spotlight now falling on London 2012, that is a whole new level of avoidance. It strikes me that this fifty one minute record will be impossible in 2012, as the Olympics will be everywhere. Unless I leave London, the next four years it will be impossible to avoid the Olympics. So its a bit of a hollow victory.
Better than failure though, as the UK diving team will tell you.