Olympics and Paralympics 2012 (and now the legacy-part one)

Badboy wrote:

Iris wrote:

wjk wrote:

Iris wrote:I don't think that the North Korean team would have been too impressed.

OMG! Can you believe that mistake?!

Errr.. NK is the one with the nukes, and the bampot dictator. Isn't it?

THAT THE ONE
LETS HOPE THERE ISN'T ANY MORE CLANGERS.

Errr.... hot off the press.....

British Olympic Association congratulates 'England's women'

http://www.itv.com/news/update/2012-07-25/british-olympic-association-congratulates-englands-women/

it really is a liberty, Wales and Scotland host the first Games of the Olympics......2 days before the opening Ceremony.!!!!!

Just over 30,000 turned up in Cardiff for the England v New Zealand game, capacity 71,000 after Cardiff has spent time and money sprucing up the City Centre, however those that did attend were not disappointed and remarked on the Hospitality of the Welsh which was nice, even an American Woman !!!!

Apparently there are now tickets available for several events, even the opening ceremony costing £20.02 up to £20,000

26 July 2012 Last updated at 11:33 Share this pageEmail Print Share this page



Members of Egypt's Olympic team have been given fake Nike gear, a synchronised swimmer has alleged.

Yomna Khallaf said her workout bags had a big Nike logo in the front but the zippers had an Adidas branding on them.

The Egyptian Olympic Committee (EOC) secretary general, Motaz Sonbol, said they were shocked to find that the gear was not "directly from Nike".

Nike said it was "concerned" athletes may have received products that do not meet the company's quality standards.

A Nike spokesman said the company was recently made aware that the EOC chose a sports gear vendor who allegedly supplied counterfeit footwear and apparel bearing the Nike trademarks.

Continue reading the main story
Olympics coverage online

The company said it was now in discussions with the EOC to see if a solution could be reached.

But the committee's chairman, Gen Mahmoud Ahmed Ali, defended the decision to go for the "counterfeit" gear because of his country's tight finances, AP reports.

"We signed with a Chinese distributor in light of Egypt's economic situation," he said.

Ms Khallaf tweeted that she had to spend more than $300 (£195) of her own money to buy satisfactory gear.

BBC Arab Affairs Editor Shaimaa Khalil says the incident has caused a major controversy on social media, with some users describing it as a disgrace.

Egypt is being represented by 112 Olympians at London 2012

====================
Now there's a thought! Adidas are sponsoring the Games and the 2,000 children taking part in the Opening Ceremony were advised to place masking
tape over any Brand names on their Trainers.......will the Egyptian team be expected to do the same????

London hopes for Olympics to remember
Survivors of the Arab Spring will represent their countries for the first time free from the tyranny
Every country will have at least one female athlete -- a first
For many it's not the politics or personalities, it's the rivalries that draw them in
The question on many minds: How will London top Beijing?
(CNN) -- Olympic officials will tell you that four billion people around the world will watch some part or another of the London Olympics during its 17-day span.

Each will have a reason of their own.

The hoops fan who wants to settle the debate -- once and for all -- about which Dream Team is better. The Arab-American who's praying she doesn't see a repeat of the Munich massacre 40 years later. The Indian expat who's pretty sure London can't top the Beijing opening ceremony.

Video: Olympics spirit going strong in Beijing


David Beckham supports Olympics
Muslim Olympian may fast for Ramadan
Remembering Olympics triple gold legend
Venus Williams excited by London 2012 Come Friday, they will plant themselves in front of their TV sets or their computer monitors. Or follow along on Twitter. Or debate with friends on Facebook.

Unless they're like David Leung in Hong Kong who'll sleep through the opening ceremony at its 4 a.m. local start time, fans will stay up in the middle of the night and, bleary-eyed, call in sick from work the next day. Others will stream the broadcasts in their office cubicle, in between work e-mails and slideshow preparations.

"We probably will have it on the office TVs," said Betsy Schneider, a senior digital marketing analyst in New York City. "(It's) all the best parts of nationalism without the whole 'taking over the world' part."

Read more: London prepares for an Olympics to remember

For the first time, every country will have at least one female athlete after Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Brunei -- the last bastions of male-only teams -- reversed course. This important precedent for women's rights will spur Susan Rachdan and many like her to tune in.

"There are so many Arab women competing, this is very uplifting to me," said Rachdan, who lives in Michigan but was raised in Saudi Arabia. "Growing up in Saudi, you feel sometimes like women are limited and not pushed to achieve much. To see women from Saudi, Qatar, the UAE, this will encourage a lot of us."

Video: Olympic training sidelined by revolution

Others, like Molly Elian, will be drawn by the unusual story of a single athlete.

Elian of St. Paul, Minnesota, is a Winter Olympics fan who said she'd pass on the Games were it not for Malaysian shooter Nur Suryani Mohamed Taibi.

"There is a particular athlete from Malaysia, I believe, who is competing in target shooting and she will be close to 9 months pregnant," Elian said. "I really want to see her compete."

Where politics and athletes intersect

Even though the Olympic charter forbids political or religious propaganda, the modern games has never truly escaped the turmoil outside.


Olympic torch relay: From Greece to UK
Inside athletes' village during Games
Making a champion for the Olympics
Rogge reflects on his last Olympics This year, athletes who survived the fury of the Arab Spring will represent their countries for the first time, free from the tyranny of dictatorship.

Athletes like Ali Khousrof, who was shot in the abdomen while protesting against the rule of then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Or Amr Seoud, the fastest man in Africa who will go against Usain Bolt in the 100-meters sprint, a year after taking part in protests that brought down Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Or South Sudan native Guor Marial who basks with pride as the first athlete from the world's youngest nation in the global arena.

Watching such Olympians is what excites Gord Oxley, an actor from Toronto.

"It gives me hope that perhaps as a species, humans can someday grow past the petty squabbles which currently mire, diminish, and divide us," Oxley said.

"I know that's a lot of mileage to get out of somebody shot putting, for example, and maybe I'm idealizing things too much."

Read why all the top sprinters come from Jamaica

Syria, in the midst of a 16-month bloody uprising against the regime, is sending 10 athletes. College student Noor Nachawati hopes their presence will help amplify the condemnation about the ongoing massacre. It's not business as usual in the country, despite the government of Bashar al-Assad portraying it so.

"I'm hoping for worldwide awareness," said Nachawati, a Syrian-American in Grand Prairie, Texas. "Enough awareness and help to where the current president is no longer president."

Another Arab-American, Sawsan Taleb-Agha, is hoping the Games will be spared a Munich-style terror attack, where 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were killed by Palestinian militants in 1972.

"I definitely hope there is not an attack, and I personally don't think anything will happen because there is so much security," said Taleb-Agha of Moraga, California. "If there is, I hope people don't assume that Islam is involved."

Where rivalries rule

For most Olympic viewers, however, it's not about politics or the personalities. It's the rivalries.

Read more: The 10 strangest Olympic sports

Tyler Lewis was not even born when the 1992 U.S. basketball team, known as the Dream Team, trounced the competition at the Barcelona Games by an average of more than 40 points. Analysts called it the greatest sports team ever assembled.

But Lewis acknowledges that this year's crop may give it a run for its money.

"LeBron (James) is the best player in basketball at this time. I think he has a chance to be the best player ever," said Lewis from North Carolina. "I think the new team is very good and has a lot of great talent. I can't say they are better than the Dream Team but they have potential to be better. I am definitely going to watch every game the U.S.A. plays in."

Read more: First Lady to lead U.S. delegation to London Olympics

Brittany Johnson is excited about a different rivalry: Can Michael Phelps replicate his success in the last Olympics, when he took home a record-breaking eight golds. Or will the phenom Ryan Lochte overshadow him?

"I am most excited to watch swimming - how Phelps is going to end his career, as well as how Lochte will perform against Phelps as he is the new face of USA swimming," said the health care professional from Ponte Vedra, Florida.

How are you celebrating the Olympics? Send iReport your stories, video

Across the world in Japan, many are excited to see a repeat of its women's soccer team against the U.S.A.

During the 2011 Women's World Cup. the Nadehiko team broke American hearts, rallying from behind, tying the game and beating the United States in penalty kicks.

"The female football is the one I'm looking forward to watch the most and hope the team gets a gold medal," said Sawako Watanabe, an architect in Tokyo. "I might have to stay up late to watch the game, and hope it won't affect my work the next day."

Video: U.S. women's soccer team aims for gold

In the history of the Games, the United States has brought home about 1,200 more medals than its nearest competitor: 2,302 versus 1,122 for the now defunct Soviet Union. Emerging powerhouse China's count stands at 385.

The numbers don't bother Zhaojian, a driver in Beijing, who didn't want to give his last name.

"I think it's impossible for China to win as much as the U.S.," he said. "China has pretty good individual athletes and they do well in the smaller events. But as for team efforts or bigger, more popular sports, China doesn't shine much."

Where the opening ceremony matters

There is little doubt among many minds, however, where China truly excelled: the opening ceremony at the Beijing Games. Some wonder how London can outdo the spectacle at the Bird's Nest stadium four years ago.

"I think the approach will have to be different - over-the-top really doesn't seem 'London-y,'" said Leah Sutton, who works for an alternative energy company in Bangalore, India.

"With apologies to my friends in London, I expect pomp and circumstance but not a lot of flash. Maybe a few quivering stiff upper lip," she joked.

Video: Olympic fever hits London

Jon Offredo, a reporter in Sandwich, Massachusetts, thinks London might still surprise us. He's holding out hope that Danny Boyle, the "Slumdog Millionaire" director who is putting together the show, pulls out an unexpected stunt.

"Whatever the cost," he said, "I can totally get behind the idea of a bunch of Mary Poppins battling a 40-foot Voldemort."

Read more: Olympic park sets gold standard for sustainability

Contributing to this report are CNN's Carma Hassan, Samira Said, and Julie In in Atlanta; Wang Xiao and CY Xu in Beijing; Jethro Mullen and Anjali Tsui in Hong Kong; Laura Smith-Spark, James Montague and Jessica Ellis in London; and Junko Ogura in Tokyo.

Click on the video Olympic spirit going strong in Beijing

Great Britain 1 Senegal 1: Pearce boys lose grip, but at least this bruising battle unites his team

Great Britain's Olympic dreams suffered an unexpected setback at Old Trafford on Friday night as Moussa Konate's late equaliser for Senegal denied them victory in their first match of the Games.

Craig Bellamy put the hosts in front with a clinical volley early in the contest.
But Stuart Pearce's men were then pushed onto the back foot by the Africans' ultra-physical approach, which largely went unpunished by Uzbek referee Ravshan Irmatov.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/olympics/article-2179462/Great-Britain-1-Senegal-1.html#ixzz21ludXIYj

BORIS JOHNSON HAS SAID THIS MAY BE THE GREATEST OLYMPIC GAMES EVER TO BE HELD.

This is the speech he made when the flame arrived in London

The Guardian 27/7/2012



London 2012: time to find out who we are

There is a sense that it could go either way, that we might pass this mammoth test or flunk it





Jonathan Freedland

The Guardian, Friday 27 July 2012

Jump to comments (54)




Absolutely Fabulous co-stars Joanna Lumley and Jennifer Saunders carry the Olympic flame in Chelsea. Photograph: Yui Mok/AP


The countdown clock that once measured in years is now down to hours, minutes and seconds. More than seven years since that hesitant, fumbling moment when Jacques Rogge of the IOC struggled to open the envelope containing the single word "London", the day is upon us. On Friday night, in a stadium built in an area once deemed an urban wasteland, the flame that has journeyed from Athens to every corner of these islands will light the fire that launches the London Olympics of 2012.

At stake will be the ambitions of more than 10,000 athletes who have trained and toiled for this fortnight, who doubtless see those five interlinked rings in their sleep, whose dreams are coloured gold. Watching them will be hundreds of thousands, and hundreds of millions more via television, drawn by that perennial human compulsion to see what our species is capable of at its best: to see how strong, how fast, how beautiful we can be.

But also at stake is a contest that involves the people of Britain especially. For these Olympic weeks will offer answers to a clutch of questions that have nagged at us since the last time London hosted the Games in 1948. What exactly is our place in the world? How do we compare to other countries and to the country we used to be? What kind of nation are we anyway?

There's nothing unique in that. Major sporting events often present their hosts with an occasion to reassess themselves and be reassessed by others. In 2008 China confirmed its seat at the global top table with the Beijing Olympics. The success of Sydney in 2000 told Australians they were as capable as any other first world nation and it was time to banish the cultural cringe. The 1984 Los Angeles Games came to represent Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America". It can work the other way too. In 2010, India's confidence took a blow when Delhi's hosting of the Commonwealth Games came in for widespread criticism. As Tony Travers, scholar of cities and especially the capital at the London School of Economics, puts it, "They're like airlines used to be: a test of national pride and capacity to deliver." And the Olympics is the big one. "It's the UN general assembly, Davos, the World Cup and the world's biggest convention of journalists all rolled into one."

Even up to the last minute, in the final days of preparation, the question of whether Britain can actually pull this off has seemed in doubt. A wearily familiar narrative is already in place: the Britain of the Daily Mail and Crap Towns, the Britain where nothing works any more. If it wasn't the failure of G4S to provide security staff, it was the threat by the PCS to call border guards out on strike. One an incompetent company made rich by privatisation, the other a militant-led trade union, the two seemed to spell out twin aspects of our troubled political past: Thatcherism and the winter of discontent uniting to ruin the Olympics.

Add in a ticketing system that left millions disappointed along with fears of a creaking transport network and a costly stadium that, so far, has no planned afterlife, and it seems that disaster looms. Commentators on the left and right have united in rage at the rocket launchers on residential roofs, the Zil lanes for IOC bigwigs, the gagging reflex of Olympic corporate sponsors, censoring anything they declare an infringement of their monopoly and, of course, the £9bn budget at a time of austerity. Until a few days ago, when summer seemed to have passed this country by, the smart money said London 2012 would be a literal and metaphorical washout, rubbish or wasteful or both. The cynics' eye view has been articulated perfectly by the BBC's brilliant Twenty Twelve series, from whose scripts Wednesday's confusion of South and North Korean flags at a women's football match in Glasgow could have been lifted directly.

All of this angst has not gone unnoticed abroad. The New York Times opened a report from London thus: "While the world's athletes limber up in the Olympic Park, Londoners are practising some of their own favourite sports: complaining, expecting the worst and cursing the authorities." In the words of Prof Stefan Szymanski, who specialises in sports management at the University of Michigan, "Perhaps Britain doesn't believe it can do this."

And yet, at the same time, a counter-narrative has been developing. Its most eloquent expression has been the 70-day torch relay, which has outrun all expectations. Drawing big, enthusiastic crowds across the entire country, it has all but erased what had been one of the chief concerns of 2012: that it would be seen as a London-only event, of interest only to the capital. Instead, the sight of a simple flame passing hand to hand, from jogging young mother to local youth worker to elderly civic volunteer, seems to have touched Britons quite deeply. In Hackney last weekend, a borough which a year ago was on the brink of vicious riots, people filled the streets not to stone policemen but to high-five them.

The sense of expectation is building, too. A staple of London smalltalk has become, "Have you got any tickets?" And the response to the appeal for volunteers has been remarkable. Their training manual forbids them from talking to the press, but I learned this week of the 72-year-old man now staying with his daughter in London so that he can work at the volleyball venue, doing 11 10-hour days in the coming two weeks, starting work each morning at six. He plans to get up at 4.30am every working day and last Friday woke at 4am in order to do a test run by Tube to the venue – promptly walking back again to calculate how long it would take if he had to travel on foot.

A much younger fellow volunteer has taken a holiday from her job in Scotland and hired a caravan for two weeks, pitching it on the outskirts of London, so that she can do her bit. They're not complaining. On the contrary, they say they're excited to be part of a once in a lifetime event.

There are, then, two conflicting impulses alive in the British breast. Perhaps we are always like this when faced with such a collective experience. Britons certainly divided over that strange, heady Diana week in 1997 and again over how to mark the millennium. In the case of the 2012 Olympics, ambivalence was encoded into its DNA from the very start.

For many Londoners the memory of that day of celebration, the cheering and whooping of 6 July 2005 when the capital's victory over Paris, Madrid, New York and Moscow was announced, is inseparable from what immediately followed: the bombings of 7 July. The timing was especially cruel, suggesting that London was both blessed and cursed, that it might win but that it would not be allowed to savour its triumph for long. Perhaps some of that mixed sentiment lingers even now.

Indeed, the combined memories will be present in human form, in the person of Martine Wright, who lost both her legs on the Circle Line train bombed outside Aldgate station on 7/7. She later took up sitting volleyball, in which sport she will compete in the Paralympic Games as a member of Team GB.

So there is nothing uncomplicated about the event . Even now, there is a sense that it could go either way, that we might pass this mammoth test or flunk it. US presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in London this week to raise funds and not, he insisted, to see the horse he owns compete in the dressage event – what his opponents gleefully call the "dancing horse contest" – said as much when he admitted he had found the G4S and PCS stories "disconcerting." And he may have been right when he wondered aloud about Britons' enthusiasm: "Do they come together and celebrate the Olympic moment? That's something which we only find out once the Games actually begin."

In this, Friday night's opening ceremony will be crucial. The choice of Danny Boyle as ringmaster suggests a possible resolution of the great British dilemma. For the show Boyle is likely to produce will surely understand something important about this nation: that the whingeing and complaining are not a repudiation of national identity, but a part of it. Sunder Katwala, founder of the thinktank British Future and a cheerful enthusiast for the Games, is not worried by the naysayers' grumbling: "Their cynicism is a performative act of Britishness," he says. "They're part of the chorus."

Boyle, he reckons, will get that. There will be no Beijing-style massed, precision choreography: "Opening ceremonies organised by the politburo deserve a raspberry," Katwala says. We remain the people George Orwell described in the essay Your England. "Why is the goose-step not used in England?" Orwell asked. "It is not used because the people in the street would laugh." Boyle knows that there can be no North Korean pageantry, nor any of the unironic, chest-puffing patriotism of LA 1984. No one in Britain says what Americans say regularly – "Is this a great country or what?" – not without an arched eyebrow anyway. So Boyle's ceremony will surely incorporate humour, self-deprecation and some of that nonconformist spirit that is continuously British.

It is a big task for one evening, even one that cost £27m, but it will be part of a process under way since the end of the second world war, as we look for our place in the world.

When London first hosted the Games in 1908, it was clear: Britain was a mighty empire that saw its natural place as bestriding the global stage, setting the sporting rules the rest of the world would follow for nearly a century and topping the medals table while we were at it. In 1948 it was a battered and exhausted London that played host, knowing that the days of imperial glory were gone for ever. What followed were decades of uncertainty over where the country was meant to go next. The result, says Szymanski, is that "we can be a bit like a manic depressive, with mood swings. Sometimes we think we're the best in the world, sometimes the worst. But we need to be realistic: we're neither."

London 2012 is predicated on an answer to that stubborn question about where we belong. It's worth going back to the bid the capital made seven years ago, especially to the three-minute video which reportedly won over wavering IOC hearts in Singapore. It hardly featured London at all. Instead it showed children in a South African township and a Latin American street market, in China and Russia, dreaming of heading to London to win Olympic gold.

This, says sportswriter Mihir Bose, who was there that day, was a radical departure from the "arrogance" not only of the French bid – whose video was full of images of the magnificence of Paris – but of past British approaches. No longer was Britain casting itself as the imperial power, which once came to the countries of others, determined to shape their futures. Instead it was inviting the people of the world to come to Britain, where they might shape their own destiny.

"It worked because it's true," says Tony Travers. "People do want to come to dear old London because they see it as Dick Whittington saw it, as a place of opportunity, a place to make their fortune. That's true for all the Africans and Poles and Americans, to name but three, who are already here. It's true of the Games because it's true of the underlying reality."

You won't hear Sebastian Coe say this, for fear of annoying the rest of the country, but, in this regard at least, this was about London, not Britain. For years, the IOC had told Britain that if it were serious about winning the games, Manchester or Birmingham would not cut it: it had to be London. (That fits with a general Olympic shift, away from the likes of Montreal, Barcelona and Atlanta, and towards capitals and mega-cities.) And, if ethnic diversity was the pitch – the notion of London as a kind of world colony, settled by the peoples of the globe – then only the capital could make it. It is London, not Britain, that can boast of being the most plural and various spot on the planet (indeed, narrowing it down, Travers says that honour may well belong to the N15 postcode). London is less segregated than even that other great world city, New York, where communities tend to live in more tightly defined enclaves. But London is also different in kind, not just degree, from the rest of Britain. Between 35% and 40% of Londoners were born outside the UK, while in parts of the capital the number of babies born to mothers born outside the UK tops 50%. The offer of what Travers calls a "neutral homeland" for the 2012 Games is one only London, not Britain, could make.

There was a time when such talk would have spelled deep alienation between the capital and the rest of the country as well as arousing the ire of British traditionalists. Some people still speak of Planet London, as if the city were utterly separate from the rest of Britain. But it's not just the success of the torch relay that suggests such thinking is becoming out of date. Katwala reckons that diversity is no longer always understood as a break or rejection of Britain's past, as it once was, but rather as continuous with it. "It's a very British globalism, it says this is where our story has got us." It's about a river Thames that opens out on to the seas or about Shakespeare, celebrated in a festival this year as a global writer whose eyes were never just on Britain but on Rome, Athens, Venice and the great stories of the world.

Much of this shift has happened within the last decade. Traditionalists in the Thatcher period clung to the old verities of national identity while struggling with the new, varied face of modern Britain. Modernisers in the Blair period were comfortable with diversity but didn't know how to talk about the past. Part of the failure of the Millennium Dome was its aversion to history, its fondness for the novel, adhering to Blair's ruling that Britain was "a young country". What 2012 suggests, with its combination of the Queen's diamond jubilee and the Games, memorably condensed by Twenty Twelve as the Jubilympics, is a synthesis: a more comfortable affirmation of both our past and our present. Katwala says the old choice was between national pride on the one hand and acceptance that Britain had changed on the other: "Now we can be proud of the nation that has changed." It helps that the Conservative party is headed by a man who won the leadership in that Olympic bid year of 2005 by declaring he loved Britain as it is, not how it used to be.

It's a good bet that plenty of these messages will be conveyed in the opening ceremony on Friday night, depicting a nation that is both ancient and postmodern, that cherishes its green pastures as well as the grit and grime of its cities. It may be that none of that gets through to the outside world. Szymanski, British-born but now based in the US, says the American coverage has shown only snapshot glimpses of Britain by way of background – and it is still the cliches of old: "Big Ben. Tower Bridge. What will Kate be wearing? The royal family. Tea. Eccentrics. Bad weather. Dodgy infrastructure."

Maybe we should not let that worry us. Maybe, like some of the most successful host nations, we should just relax and invite the world to have a fortnight of fun, rather than fretting about legacy and meaning. But it's hard to relax when so much is at stake. Seven years ago we told the world that we could come together to stage a spectacular Olympic Games and that we were a kinder, gentler, more inclusive country, open to the rest of humanity. The world believed it. The question is, can we believe it too?
==============================================
Great Article.

I'm watching Breakfast T.V. on BBC and can't help feeling optimistic that the Games will prove very successful, the Olympic torch has this morning been
carried through the maze in Hampton Court, is now on the Royal Barge sailing on the Thames, snippets of childrens excitement at singing around the U.K. will be featured so will enjoy the spectacle with the estimated 4 Billion around the World of the opening ceremony at 9.12pm tonight.

P.S. That was a good start for England playing Football......if we couldn't beat Senegal what chance have we got.????

CNN video giving away a couple of secrets.about what we can expect.


http://edition.cnn.com/video/?hpt=ieu_t5#/video/bestoftv/2012/07/25/exp-early-zain-verjee-july-25.cnn

Nice video cherry1

thanks Panda, lets hope its a good Opening Ceremony and we are not shown
up to the whole world


However Im putting on my positive face!

cherry1 wrote:thanks Panda, lets hope its a good Opening Ceremony and we are not shown
up to the whole world


However Im putting on my positive face!

I'm just settling down to watch the opening ceremony at 9.15 on BBC 1, not sure about the Farm bit and Shakespeares The Tempest is not his most popular work, but I'll let you know tomorrow what I thought of the opening Ceremony.

Morning cherry1......how petty that the videos have been blocked.!!!

I must admit I fell asleep during part of the ceremony but it has been a great success and described as "quirky" and the Queen and Daniel Craig as
James Bond a masterstroke....I missed the bit where they parachuted down LOL

My American friend e-mailed me earlier saying they were thinking of me while watching the Ceremony which she described as "awesome", so for all my
moans I'm glad it turned out so well. Apparently, the Brits are notorious for moaning.

London (CNN) -- Hundreds of millions around the world have been dazzled by the sights and sounds of director Danny Boyle's opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The four-hour, £27 million ($42.4 million) spectacle contained references to such globally-recognized British icons such as James Bond, David Bowie and Harry Potter's Lord Voldemort.

But with the production tossing out historical and cultural references at a rapid rate, even the most ardent Anglophiles in the audience may have felt some allusions whiz over their head like an airborne nanny.

The Oscar-winning director of "Slumdog Millionaire" says the ceremony, titled "Isles of Wonder," was inspired by a passage in Shakespeare's The Tempest, believed to have been written in 1610 and set on a remote, magical island.

Although that phrase itself appears nowhere in the play, the character Caliban refers to his home as an isle "full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not."

The line encapsulates the vision fellow film director Stephen Daldry, the ceremony's creative director, says the production sought to represent, in capturing "the rich heritage, diversity, energy, inventiveness, wit and creativity that truly defines the British Isles."

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not

Caliban, the deformed native of Shakespeare's The Tempest, speaks the line that is said to have inspired the opening ceremonyThe ceremony opened with a scene inspired by the work of another English literary genius, the Romantic visionary poet and painter William Blake: Specifically, the preface to his epic "Milton a Poem" -- "And did those feet in ancient time," better known as "Jerusalem."

Written in 1804, the poem was set to music in 1916 by Sir Hubert Parry, and sung to bolster flagging spirits during the war years. With its lyric describing the establishment of a new Jerusalem in England, it has become England's most recognized patriotic song, sung as a religious hymn and a de facto national anthem at many sporting events.

No less than three phrases from its 16 lines -- "green & pleasant land," "dark satanic mills" and a "chariot of fire" -- have entered the national lexicon, and were referenced within the ceremony.

The first provided the theme for the opening scene, which presented a vision of England as a pre-industrial rural idyll -- the type of bucolic setting in which J. R. R. Tolkien's Hobbits made their home.

Animals gambolled, workers tended the fields while a game of cricket took place on a village green, complete with a maypole -- a traditional focal point for community celebrations in British village life.

In one area of the stadium was a mound resembling Glastonbury Tor, an historically significant hill in Somerset identified with King Arthur. The hill carries a link to the Jerusalem theme, as Blake's poem is inspired by the "Glastonbury Legend" -- an apocryphal story that one of Jesus' relatives, Joseph of Arimathea, had visited Glastonbury and taken Jesus there as a boy. Glastonbury also has a more contemporary significance as the home of the UK's most famous music festival.

It was he who put me up to the little thing I did for the hospital

J.M. Barrie, author of 'Peter Pan,' on his fictional creation's role in encouraging him to donate the proceeds from the work to London's Great Ormond Street HospitalEnter the "dark satanic mills" of the industrial revolution, which began in the UK in the middle of the 18th century and swept throughout the rest of the world, transforming society and laying the foundations of the modern world in its wake.

Featured in the ceremony were representations of looms for manufacturing textiles and iron-making processes which played a key role in the revolution.

The next, dreamlike sequence celebrated one of Britain's most beloved institutions, the National Health Service, while playing on its link to another celebrated icon.

Founded in 1948, the NHS provides free healthcare, and has become the fifth largest employer in the world, with 1.7 million staff. Many Britons are fiercely proud of the service and have fought to defend it from successive waves of reforms.

The NHS was represented here by several wards' worth of nurses pushing hospital beds, which were used as trampolines by children before being arranged to spell out the word: "Gosh."

Coming in close proximity to a recitation from J.M. Barrie's children's classic Peter Pan -- "When you play at it by day with the chairs and table-cloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the two minutes before you go to sleep it becomes very real" -- this was a clear reference to Great Ormond Street Hospital, a London children's hospital closely associated with that book.

In 1929, Barrie gifted all the rights from the work to the hospital, claiming that Peter Pan himself had been a patient there, and that "it was he who put me up to the little thing I did for the hospital."

Apparently a lady rang the BBC and said she heard that there was a hurricane on the way. Well, don't worry, if you're watching, there isn't

The line weatherman Michael Fish is said to have uttered during a forecast before deadliest storm to hit Britain in decades Peter Pan was not the only children's literary character to feature in the segment, as a shower of Mary Poppinses -- the magical English nanny who was the heroine of P. L. Travers' book series -- blew in from above, to do battle with a towering character who resembled Lord Voldemort, the main villain of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books (Rowling herself also appeared in the ceremony).

The heroes didn't all hail from the world of books. At one point a Mini appeared -- the classic two-door economy car first manufactured by the British Motor Corporation in 1959. The next narrative segment was more modern and raucous, featuring a house party crashed by a horde of social networking teens. The attention also shifted to Britain's rich lineage of musical stars: Queen, David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, New Order and the Eurythmics, among many others.

The ceremony also made great play of the two great, inescapable constants of British life -- the weather, and the dry national humor.

At one point in the proceedings, as a "storm cloud" broke and threatened to jeopardize the celebrations on stage, an audio clip familiar to many Britons was played. It contained the immortal words of veteran television weatherman Michael Fish, best remembered for allegedly saying, hours before a killer 1987 storm: "Apparently a lady rang the BBC and said she heard that there was a hurricane on the way. Well, don't worry, if you're watching, there isn't."

In recent years, Fish has been at pains to point out that the British public has misremembered his role in the affair, saying he wasn't working that day and that his infamous quote was actually made in relation to another storm.

On any other day, he might resent the matter being revisited. But tonight he will surely manage a laugh at the unlikely way the bane of his career has placed him at center stage, in celebrated company, at Britain's biggest party.

Home News U.S. Sport TV&Showbiz Femail Health Science Money RightMinds Coffee Break Travel Columnists News Home Arts Headlines Pictures Most read News Board My Profile Logout Login Find a Job M&S Wine Our Papers Feedback Saturday, Jul 28 2012 12PM 17°C 3PM 16°C 5-Day Forecast 'She'll have an unfair advantage because she's got a dolphin's face': Frankie Boyle takes to Twitter to mock Olympic swimmer Rebecca AdlingtonScottish comedian renews long-running feud with British Olympic champion
Boyle has previously refused to apologise for his offensive remarks
By Adam Shergold
PUBLISHED: 17:36, 27 July 2012 | UPDATED: 08:42, 28 July 2012
Comments (329) Share

Controversial comedian Frankie Boyle has renewed his long-running feud with Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington.
He posted on Twitter: 'I worry that Rebecca Adlington will have an unfair advantage in the swimming by possessing a dolphin's face.'
Adlington, a double gold medal winner at last year's Beijing Olympics, complained to the BBC that it let the comic off with a 'slap on the wrist' after he made comments that 'humiliated' her.
Scottish comedian Boyle posted on Twitter that Adlington would have an advantage at the Olympics because 'she has a face like a dolphin'
Olympic and World champion swimmer Rebecca Adlington has been the target of Boyle's remarks on a number of oaccasions
Boyle's offensive tweet about Adlington
During an episode of the satirical Mock the Week show, he said she resembled 'someone looking at themselves in the back of a spoon'.
His comments drew 75 complaints, but the BBC Trust took no further action, despite criticising him.
Boyle refused to apologise, said the BBC Trust ruling was worthless and compared Adlington to a beagle.

More...What a clanger! Jeremy Hunt narrowly avoids injuring spectators as bell flies off handle into crowd at Olympics celebrations
Olympics gaffe as hundreds of confused spectators are turned away from archery event billed as 'unticketed'... as organisers insist that actually means 'closed to public'
Mission accomplished: After 70 days and 8,000 miles, the Olympic torch sweeps up the Thames on last leg of its great British journey ... and it won't be seen again until the opening ceremony tonight
Racing for gold: Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish gear up for tomorrow's Olympic Road Race... but it'll be motoring hell with road closures starting at 3am

Last night, Adlington ignored his post, but one Twitter user, Peter Steele, wrote: 'She will be requesting you to apologise for this comment...she tried it before, she'll try again.'
The Tweet was removed from Boyle's profile, though he did continue to post jokes about the Olympics.
Adlington, who won two gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is again hoping for glory in the 400m and 800m freestyle events, as well as the 4x200m freestyle relay.
Today, Adlington, 23, urged the British team to seize their 'one shot' at competing in an Olympics with home advantage.
She said: 'It is going to be so different and something that you can't fully prepare for. It's exciting and new and just one of those things that you have to take in your stride.
'I know it sounds like a song, but this is our one shot to compete at a home Olympics. I just think it's going


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2179938/Frankie-Boyle-takes-Twitter-mock-Olympic-swimmer-Rebecca-Adlington.html#ixzz21uhmCFM1

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Don't take any notice of him Rebecca......he is just an ignoramous.

Well, sad to say team GB got nowhere in the Cycling race, not even threatened anyone. !!! Whether it was fatigue or bad planning no one could say.
Khazakstan won .

Olympic organisers are investigating why hundreds of seats were empty for a swimming session at the Aquatic Centre, in east London, on Saturday morning.

The BBC's Nick Hope said areas high in the stands at the sold-out event were full but several hundred dearer seats lower down were not filled.

Locog said some accredited seats - for press and media - were empty.

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"We're looking into who should have been in the seats and why they weren't there," a spokeswoman told BBC News.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the Aquatic Centre during the morning session while 14-time Olympic gold medallist swimmer Michael Phelps scraped through to Saturday night's final of the 400m individual medley.

Sports correspondent Nick Hope said the number of empty seats was the only negative aspect of the session.

It did not harm the atmosphere, which at times - particularly around the British performances - was deafening, he said.

But it meant Olympic organisers still had some work to do, he added.

Meanwhile, tennis fans have complained to the BBC over queues to get into Wimbledon on Saturday morning, saying a ticket office was closed because the key to open it had been lost.

Locog has yet to comment.


What a shambles ticket allocations have been , those British who really wanted to buy tickets couldn't get them then tickets were being sold by non residents of the U.K. at exhorbitant prices. Yesterday tickets for the Opening Ceremony had not been received so the purchasers had to show their receipt, now tickets allocated to Press and Media were not taken up for the swimming, a very popular event which could probably have been sold 3
times over.

Well it was certainly different

Not sure why those vids are blocked