Wembley Arena...or how to train 10000 people.

Here i am, 24 hours after the training in Webley Arena...and no, it  wasn t cold..because it was inside! It was just like going to a football match or a concert: long queues at different doors, streams and streams of people with their paper tickets or smartphones codes, more or less chatting, more or less freezing , standing outside.

Once inside, the 10000 off people, of which your humble self, were hosted by Jonathan Edwards for an afternoon of training, which i must say was well balanced, a proper exercise in edu-tairnment.

Now they asked us to use social media during the session with care, ie, more than welcome to say how cool and great it was but not to communicate anything deemed sensitive. I 'm not sure what could qualify as dangerous or confidential, as the session was really focused on common sense principles,the secret being in highlighting them so that we are all aware of them and know to use them during the Games.


After the initial awkwardness, i decided to chat to my neighbours, only to find that 2 of them have already being participating in  test events or qualifying events, which is really exciting as they already have plenty of anecdotes . They both seem to embody what we're supposed to be about, ie, being professional, putting or egos aside, but still being human and enjoying the whole show. You could tell they were really chuffed by what they had been doing up to now but they kept it low key.


So during the afternoon we saw Olympians ( and not only Jonathan :-)), the CEO of LOCOG, the Police Commissioner in charge of putting on the Games ( no pressure) the head of Events and the head of Catering ( this is the biggest catering exercise since the war for England...MASSIVE), and all of them seemed to be just normal people, just doing their best to do a good job, not really puffed up or preening. This gave the whole afternoon a nice "human" touch: although this is a gigantic endeavour, there are real people ( with their faults and weaknesses) behind it all. Apparently London is in a very place regarding schedule and general preparation...things are going as well as good be expected,

more on the next post....