The annoying London Olympic Torch debacle

April 13th, 2008

One of the great things about living in the centre of London is that events come to you instead of the other way around. Last week it was the turn of the Olympic torch to pass along Hyde Park and beneath my balcony. This is the torch being handed off a few moments after someone rushed into the street and tried to grab it.
About an hour before anything started happening the Tibet protesters and the police started to gather. There were an extraordinary number of police – I saw at least a hundred just in my small stretch of road. Though the Tibet people were noisy and somewhat rowdy, there seemed to be a basic sort of detente going on – a few protesters even chatting to the cops during lulls in the noise.
Of course then the torch turned up. I saw 2 ‘incidents’ one of which made it on to the front page of the Times. From the photos it looked quite dramatic but in reality a guy charged through the relatively sparse police lines (they weren’t standing close enough to link arms), immediately tripped and fell into the path the Chinese ‘bodyguards’ running with the torch and was then bundled off by 4 or 5 cops. Someone also tried to put the torch out with a supersoaker water pistol and the police seemed to react to this but given it was from about 10 feet away and it had been snowing pretty consistently the entire morning I’m not sure how serious an attempt this was.
As usual, this was blown out of all proportion – though I’m not a fan of the police in general, they pretty much didn’t annoy anyone and took care of the disturbances pretty efficiently. The protesters were mostly well behaved and only a few took liberties.
I’m not really annoyed with either side here but I am annoyed with London, the government and the Chinese. Why was this stupid ritual being enacted and why did we deploy 2000 policemen on Sunday overtime to protect it? London’s budget for the Olympics has moved from £3bn to £12bn and no-one here wants the damn thing – when are we going to admit that this is a completely corrupt process and – more the point – no one cares about the stupid sports?

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