The Bugle 🧡 London 2012

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers, welcome to Bugle issue 4312, sub-episode A for Away on Holiday in Spain.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and as you listen to this, or sometime before, depending on when you listen to it, I will be either A parading around on a beach in 40 degree heat in my bugle branded speedos knocking back cans of pre-mixed apparole spritz and prepping for another evening of gyrating like a liquidized ferret to hardcore 1990s house or b mooching slowly around a beautiful medieval town clothed snout to toe because the sun and my skin really don't get on contemplating the glories of the northern Spanish landscape appreciating what can be achieved with the leg of a pig and thinking about cricket.

So, uh, it's B, by the way.

So to keep your bugle feed fed during our hiatus, we are going back in time.

Right now, the French are hosting their tribute to London 2012, which has been charmingly nicknamed Paris 2024.

12 years ago, of course, civilization peaked, and I spent all my time and almost all of my money watching humans do things they really shouldn't be able or willing to do.

Here is a collection of bugle specials from London 2012 celebrating the very best of humankind.

Brackets, doing objectively pointless and mostly ludicrous physical activities category.

Here you go.

Welcome to issue one of what I'm calling to be on the safe side legally and, in accordance with my Jewish heritage, the Londinium 5772 Nemean Games Daily Bugle Micro Sports Bulletin.

Might work on a catcher title at some point in the next couple of weeks.

Every day during the 5772 Games I will be reporting from one of the largest cities in the history of Britain on this two-week long mega sports day that has got this nation on the edge of its seat and for once without that seat being on the edge of a cliff.

I'll be telling you exactly what it is like to queue up for hours a day to watch sports that I know absolutely nothing about.

And also telling you absolutely everything you need to know or even deserve to know about what has been going on at the games.

Who won what, who pissed in what bottle and for how long, and what the hell are the rules of Greco-Roman wrestling.

I know the Greco-bit is about oiling up and getting naked, we all know that.

And I think the Roman bit is about defending yourself by putting a shield on your back, or maybe just about daubing pornographic graffiti on the dressing room walls, but but I don't really know.

I'm hoping I'll find out.

So, sport o'clock has unquestionably struck, struck just as we predicted it would in this week's bugle and just as it was scheduled to do for several years and what a beginning an opening ceremony that was as all opening ceremonies are mind-bendingly ludicrous but also absolutely spectacular wildly ambitious and deeply educational did you know for example that in the industrial revolution in britain giant chimneys sprouted magically out of the ground in seconds people were understandably confused didn't know what to do with them at first so they just went inside and worked until they contracted a fatal lung disease.

And that is what Britain's industrial and economic might was founded upon.

It was hard to follow everything that was going on in this celebration of British history and Britishness, but it definitely involved an 18th-century cricket match, in which I'm pretty sure I saw the bowler cuss the umpire in a most un18th-century way, and also involved a brief bit of farming.

Now, of course, there was much talk and controversy before the ceremony about the live animals that were being used.

I think it was 8,000 head of sheep and 35,000 endangered chickens that were being used in the ceremony.

Well I can happily confirm that none of those animals were hurt.

They were all taken to the water polo arena and humanely drowned.

They will be available at the Donna Kebab and chicken burger outlets at the Olympic Park throughout the Games, although you do have to pay a 25% premium for meat from an animal who starred in and then was slaughtered after the opening ceremony.

But I would say that is a fair price to eat history.

The pace of the historical narrative in the first section of the show was such that I did miss a few crucial moments in modern British history that I was really looking forward to seeing.

The first moment that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert got it on on their wedding night, of course, that produced the origin of bunting, as discussed on a recent bugle, and also Florence Nightingale leaning seductively over those wounded soldiers in a daringly high-cut top.

But you can't see everything.

And of course, one of the big talking points before was who was going to light the flame?

how big a surprise was the creative genius behind the ceremony Danny Boyle going to spring was it going to be maybe one of the great missing figures for Britain maybe Lord Lucan Captain Oates tragically missing in Antarctica since 1912 or maybe he would finally unmask Jack the Ripper maybe it would even be 1980 snooker legend Tony Mio firing an exploding blue ball into the cauldron.

Who knows?

Was it going to be Winston Churchill Back from the Dead?

Or Elvis?

None of these sadly, although Team GB did appear all to be dressed in Elvis jackets for the athlete's parade, which was a lovely tribute to a man who has spawned so many British Elvis impersonators.

The flame was in fact lit by a group of children chosen to represent the new generation of sport, a lovely gesture, although not quite as spectacular as what we'd all wanted to see, which was of course the Queen being fired out of a cannon in a flaming magnesium suit and landing in a giant cauldron of oil shaped like Henry VIII's balls.

But nevertheless, it was a stirring moment of aesthetic beauty and drama, a magnificent culmination to a ceremony that was mostly excellent and unremittingly British, albeit without anyone opening fire on crowds of natives in confined spaces or exporting smallpox to other places in the world to wipe out the local population and make it easier to nick their stuff and bring it home and whack it in the museum, without anyone even spluttering their coffee over a newspaper after reading the latest economic figures, without even any children in inner-city Victorian slums dying of typhoid and cholera.

But it was still, despite all that, was still very British and a fitting climax to a landmark evening in 21st century Britain.

An undeniable sign that sports and London had met, they'd hit it off and they were about to get funky with each other.

The perfect culmination to that ceremony.

And then Paul McCartney came on and led the stadium into mid-range karaoke to Hey Jude.

Bit of an odd conclusion in my book, but there you go, perhaps the result of a contractual dispute.

So Paul, would you like to be in the opening ceremony?

Yeah, of course I would.

But I want my own piano made of zebra ribs.

I want a space hopper in my dressing room.

That's all on my standard rider.

And I'm headlining.

Uh, okay, Sir Paul.

We just kind of wanted to end with the flame being lit.

We thought that'd be the most dramatic way to end it.

I'm headlining.

I'm Paul Sodding McCartney.

I bounce on a space hopper and I headline gigs.

Capische.

Well, we just thought it would seem a little incongruous after an evening of spectacular industrial-level choreography.

I'm headlining.

Or you can get Leo Sayer to do it.

Okay, Sir Paul, you've got yourself a deal.

The other real consternation was the pre-recorded sketch featuring James Bond and the Queen.

Not a pretend queen, the real Queen.

And not a real James Bond, but the pretend James Bond.

Played by Daniel Craig, the real James Bond.

It was the genuine queen, the queen who, if you prod her with a toasting fork, would say, ouch, don't do that.

I am the queen.

It has to be said that the Q unit did look a little

on the grumpy side of the mood seesaw during the ceremony, whenever the cameras picked her up, presumably because he was thinking, I really prefer horses racing.

I can't seem to bet on who's going to win the parade, because all the countries beginning with A have got a big old advantage.

Anyway, in the sketch, James Bond picked up the Queen at Buckingham Palace and got into a helicopter with her.

Now, how was this allowed to happen?

Because when James Bond gets into a helicopter with a woman, only one thing is ever going to happen.

He's going to doink that woman.

James Bond plus woman plus vehicle equals doink.

Now, I'm not judging her, he's a good-looking boy, but there's a time and a place for these things and the Olympic opening ceremony is not it.

Another highlight was the National Health Service starring role represented by hospital beds, actual medical staff and children bouncing up and down on those beds in a way that, were they to do it in hospital, would result in them being A, told off by matron and B sent home for being absolutely fine and told to stop wasting doctors valuable time time pretending they'd swallowed a lizard.

It was all good fun but sadly led to the deaths of 550 unattended patients on hospital floors across London whose last words were, what do you mean the beds, doctors and nurses are all busy dancing?

All in all an iconic start to the games which was good because we in Britain we need these games to be good.

We need them to be very good and we need them to be packed with British success.

Because as David Cameron, the Prime Minister, himself said to all the Team GB athletes before the ceremony, you've all done very well to make it onto Team GB.

We're all immensely proud of you.

The whole nation is behind you.

Now, please, don't f it up.

Seriously, you're all we've got.

Don't let us down.

The economy is fed.

The banks have been treating us all like an unwanted Christmas puppy.

My government is about as popular as a shark in a swimming pool.

All we've got is the Queen, and even she lost her boat race down the Thames to Steve Redgrave and the Olympics.

We can't afford bread, so these circuses had better work out.

Hello, micro-buglers, and welcome to issue 7 of the Londinium 5772 Sports Cyclopedia of Truth for Sunday, the 5th of August, 2012.

I am Andy Zodsman, and I have won now only one fewer Olympic gold medals than Jessica Ennis.

She's just taken the lead, and fair play to her, she probably deserved it.

But it's not over till it's over.

I've got four years to learn how to do a triple-twisting pike-back somersault, and I reckon I could double up in the diving and trampolining and come home from Rio with two shiny gongs around my neck.

Now, yesterday was unquestionably the greatest day in the history of British athletics.

Three goals in a single session in the Olympics for the first time ever.

Three athletics goals is as many as we won in any Olympics since 1964.

It's more than Britain won in Seoul, Barcelona, and Atlanta combined, or Mexico, Munich, and Montreal combined, or London, Part 1, Helsinki, Melbourne, and Rome combined, or indeed all the ancient Olympics between 776 BC and 394 AD combined.

The first of the goals was won by Ennis who used her flawless athletic form to dominate the hectathon as if it was an unusually recalcitrant unwanted Christmas puppy.

Ennis' body has been honed beyond perfection to be able to run fast whilst jumping over things, jump over a high thing, throw a big heavy round thing not that far, running fast without jumping over things, jumping into a sandpit without falling for the temptation of making a sandcastle, throwing a pointy thing quite far, and running reasonably fast for a couple of minutes.

An amazing range of skills.

Now, I was in the stadium on Friday morning when she did the first of those two disciplines, and the noise and excitement could not have been matched if the queen had absailed into the stadium from a passing pterodactyl, unpeeled her queen outfit to reveal the still alive and more importantly, young again Elvis Presley, who then promised everyone that they would never have to pay tax, vote, or even talk to a customer service helpline ever again, before cracking into jailhouse rock and downing a pint of overpriced lager.

So, last night, when Ennis sealed victory by winning an 800-metre race that she could have hopped around and still won the overall gold, the Olympic Stadium vesuviused itself in excitement, as if trying to preserve the whole of East London for all time in an unstoppable pyroclastic cheer.

To be honest, it was a great moment, but how much better would it have been, Jessica Ennis, if you had taken that opportunity of having a comfortable 300-point lead to do one of the greatest bits of showboating in British sporting history.

To moonwalk up the entire home strait to milk the moment.

Sure, doing a sprint finish and winning your race was a nice way to end it, but how much better would it have been if you had moonwalked through in last and won by just a single point?

I think for all your virtues, you still need to learn a little bit about sporting showmanship.

After Ennis, then we saw Britain's finest victory in sand since Montgomery's North Africa campaign in World War II.

Greg Rutherford's possible granddad, the science whiz Ernie Rutherford, famously split the atom.

And the athlete Greg took that one step further, even and split the Olympic long jump field to pieces to take gold with a jump of 8 meters 31 centimeters.

Now to put that in context for non-sports fans, that is not long enough to save him from a crocodile-infested lake with a width of 8 meters 32 centimeters, but it is long enough that he could leap over a pit full of poisonous snakes that was 8 meters 30 wide.

This distance wouldn't actually have won Ralphord gold in any other Olympics since 1972, but that's irrelevant.

It just shows what a role Team GB is now on.

They can even make athletes from other countries do not particularly well.

That is the power of the London Olympics and the roar of the London crowd.

Then to cap off one of the iconic nights in the history of British sport or indeed in modern British national life.

VO Day culminated with Mo Farah taking gold in the 10,000 meters.

Farah, another athlete who moves as if put on the earth by Zeus as a classic demonstration of how to move the human body nicely, sprinted home with a final lap surge and Britain as a whole went noisily berserk.

The kind of reaction we have not seen from the British public since Team GB theoretical chemist Sir John Popel won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry.

Arguably even more excited than that, and even more unified as a nation without a few rogue physics fans shouting abuse at Popol and smashing up some chemistry labs.

Now, I think I've made it amply clear in these podcasts that I really love the Olympics once the sport breaks out from the associated commercial and political gameplaying.

I loved the Olympics when Britain weren't very good at them, and I love the Olympics when Britain has decided to plow all its funding and resources into making Punch and Judy shows the world's leading form of theatre, instead of into making sure that some British people are extremely fast on a bicycle or extremely good at sitting backwards in a boat and waggling their arms around.

And I love Olympic athletics, one of the few things in the 21st century sportiverse that still has genuine rarity.

I'll admit, Olympic rowing, not really my bag.

I don't mind other people having quadrennial fun with it, but doesn't really set my sporting ganglions a thrumming.

But athletics, hell yeah, particularly when you can hear it with a naked ear from space.

And a home team success always brings the excitement to the boil in Olympics, or any major sporting event, brings it to the boil like a pan of suicidal pasta.

And last night, the spaghetti hoops blew themselves all over the kitchen, leaving the cook staggering around with molten tomato sauce burning his face and shouting i don't care i can't even feel it because of jessica and the scarring will just be a memento of britain was temporarily and vicariously great again it might even be in the shape of the olympic rings in fact i'm going to put another pan on i want more spaghetti hoops on my face this was a truly glorious sport nights if you love sport or indeed any other form of mass global distraction from the harsh realities of reality if religion has been supplanted as the opium of the masses by televised karaoke, then Olympi sport has perhaps proved itself the ecstasy of the masses or the couple of glasses of red wine too many of the masses, depending on how you like to get your kicks.

But most importantly, sports has also established itself in Britain as the helium of the masses, making everyone feel a bit light-headed and talk in excited, squeaky voices.

Nothing could spoil this sporting day of days for Britain.

On Sunday evening, I went to the 100 meters final.

I managed to get a ticket for me and my wife.

That's Mrs.

Zoltzmann to you, lots.

Have some respect.

Thanks to the ludicrous idiocy of the official ticketing system playing into the hands of people like me.

People who have more time than sense and can persuade themselves that forking out a fat wadge of queenbacks, as British banknotes should henceforth be known, on watching eight guys run as fast as possible for slightly less long than it takes to decide whether or not to have a slice of toast in the morning, is a legitimate use of money.

Money that they could otherwise spend on, for example, food and clothing for their children, or solving the Middle East crisis.

We just need to throw money at the problem.

It's worked with British sports since the discovery of the national lottery.

It should work with the Middle East.

Get scientific backup teams for top Israeli and Palestinian politicians and, more importantly, obeying 80,000 crowd roaring them on.

It clearly works.

The 100m final I can now confirm for those who've been avoiding the results was won by a fast man.

A very fast man.

Usain Bolt, the reigning champion, a man who has expanded human understanding of how fast a simple implement of legs could make a human nose move forwards, spranted away from the fastest collection of other fast men ever assembled in possibly the greatest display of running fast since Little Mickey Caveman first encountered Big Johnny Dinosaur.

As a spectator, it was entirely mesmeric, mesmeric enough for the stadium PA system to grant the race 10 seconds without a gobbit of high-volume pop music, which shows you quite how momentous this race was.

Bolts, beaten by Johann Blake in both sprints of the Jamaican trials this year, far from his best in some of his races in the build-up to the games, eliminated by a full start in last year's World Championship final, turned what was widely predicted to be a close final into a 9.63 second schooling of the other 7 billion people on the planet in the core subject of who is the fastest person in the known universe.

It was a staggering moment to witness as a sports fan or indeed as a fully paid-up member of the human race.

or even as a partly paid up member of the human race.

I've fallen behind on my subs, but I'm good for them.

I'll make them up, honest.

Sport is never more intense than the Olympic 100 meters final.

10 seconds out of every four years, you guys get from here to here in a straight line as fast as your incredibly honed legs will carry you.

It doesn't get more simple and elemental than that.

And Bolt got his tactics right: run as fast as possible and make sure that's faster than the other guys.

Thus, he confirmed himself as one of the greatest sports humans in history.

Watching it was a soul-shaking and was visceral experience, seeing one of the greatest events in sport, and one of sport's greatest ever sportists, sporting himself into immortal sportality.

The next morning, I and the family went to watch canoe and kayak racing.

First round heat.

In one of those heats, there were only five boats.

How many would progress to the semi-final, you ask?

Five.

It lacks something of the sporting intensity that makes the Olympics so unique.

And it's hard to become emotionally involved when the only possible source of intrigue is whether the Eden College Rowing Lake that's right, it's owned by Eden College, nothing wrong with that, it's just up to all the other schools in the country to discover where their own rowing lakes are.

Whether it might actually contain a crocodile who's been biding his time to play a tremendous prank.

Sport giveth, but it also taketh away.

In terms of relative experiences, I imagine it was similar for what Neil Armstrong went through after going to the moon the next morning after landing when his wife said, Can you go and pick me up a pint of milk from the shops?

And Armstrong said, There's already a pint of milk in the fridge.

And his wife said, Oh, that's okay.

Can you just get it from the fridge then?

And finally, in breaking news, one of the Olympic mascots, Wenlock and Mandeville, has been arrested on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly in the fountains at Trafalgar Square.

The mascot, believed to be Mandeville by scientists, was heard screaming, What am I?

What am I?

Am I supposed to be something to do with sport?

Am I a sperm?

I think I'm a sperm, but who am I?

And why am I?

And why couldn't I have been a lion or something?

Both mascots incidentally have names relevant to British Olympic history.

Wenlock, named after a natural British-grown herbal poison used by sprinter Harold Abrahams to incapacitate his rivals before the Paris 1924 100m final, and Mandeville was the name of a demonstration sport at the 1908 London Games, a men-only form of vaudeville dancing that was swiftly jettisoned from the Olympic programme after an incident involving the German team, some faulty stitching and some clearly visible grunches and crankhandles.

Yesterday, Alastair Brownlee won the triathlon, a sport dear to the heart of bugle producer Chris, albeit one that inhabits my own personal waking nightmares.

Frankly, in my book, Prometheus had it easy.

Having his liver ripped out every day by a cocky and foul-mouthed eagle could have been a lot worse.

He could have been forced to run a triathlon every day.

Having complained about Jessica Ennis' failure to use her massive victory cushion in the final event of the heptathlon, the 800 metres, to indulge in some well-earned showboating by maybe moonwalking the last hundred metres, or running the race dressed as a giant inflatable Queen Elizabeth I or painting herself gold, sticking herself to a giant wheel and rolling round the track, track, it is only fair to praise Brownley for literally walking across the line with a flag draped around him.

As showboating goes, maybe not quite as dramatic as Usain Bolt playing to the cameras for the last 30 metres of the 2800 metre final, and probably not actually showboating at all, more savouring the moment of exhausted culmination of a lifelong dream in front of a baying crowd of British triathlon hooligans.

So glad they behave themselves for once and didn't go around smashing up people's bicycles, tying their shoelaces together whilst wearing a snorkel.

But still, there are those who suspect that the entire sport of triathlon is in fact nothing but a modern, touchy-feely sop to the transportationally indecisive.

Ooh, swim, cycle, or run.

Don't make me choose.

Take the train, you buffoon.

Or at least let's modernise what seems to be a relic of a 19th-century attempt to escape from the London police.

Swim across the Thames, hijack a penny-farthing bike, and then peg it into the undergrowth.

That's basically how Jack the Ripper escaped justice for so long.

He was a pioneering triathlete.

Technology is already taking over sport.

Nations with advantages in funding and high-tech equipment and backup are dominating an increasing number of events.

Let's just give it full reign.

Jet ski, rocket-powered motorbike, and jetpack.

Fear not the infernal breath of change, people.

There is not a person in the world who would not tune all their available televisions in for that.

People, I have an admission to make.

This morning I was supposed to go to the blue-ribboned event of this and all Olympics, the men's 50-kilometre megawaddle, or racewalkers, traditionalists call it.

9 a.m.

start on the mall.

I slept with my precious ticket close to my heart.

Well, about three yards from my heart on a shelf, but that's still pretty close on a kind of global level.

I set my alarm for 7 a.m.

The alarm woke me up at 11:30 a.m.

Buglers.

I missed the sport.

Oh, God.

I missed the sport.

Who am I anymore?

Has sport defeated me?

Have I outsported myself with too much sport?

Or was this my subconscious finally kicking into action and saying, Andy, you're 37, a father of two.

You have done nothing for the last fortnight apart from watch sport, think about sport, talk about sport, and sleep not enough hours a night in your spiritual sport jarmas.

Do you really want to get up at 7am to go and watch a thirty-mile scuttle?

Finally, my subconscious self has looked at my sport watching schedule and said, No.

It's a small start, but maybe, just maybe, it could mark the beginning of me devoting my brain to stuff that actually matters a bit.

I hope not, and I will do everything in my sport-watching power to stop that happening.

Reality is the last thing I need in my life right now, but these are truly worrying times.

I'll digress.

Back to the sports.

Last night, I had a double bill of pugilism.

Wrestling and boxing, neither sport I'd ever seen live before or even participated in, voluntarily at least.

Wrestling is a sport as old as the first encounter between caveman and bear, which is won on a technicality by caveman after bear was penalised for an illegal bite to the head.

I saw the freestyle brand of wrestling, not the Greco-Roman one that involves added philosophy and incest, and it's a curious event that looks like it might be an entry in a Pears Sherards competition in which the two contestants are acting out the hit TV documentary, The Mating Rituals of Amazonian Insects.

There's a lot of grappling, some risky-looking attempted mountings, and by the looks of it, considerable amounts of pain.

What was noticeable about it was how little the competitors seemed to enjoy it.

Partly because being wrestled by a wrestler is presumably zero fun, so even if you are the wrestler rather than the wrestleee, you can be pretty sure that the other guy will soon be wrestling you back.

It looks a truly grim business.

And if you didn't actually watch the bouts, but then try to guess who'd won based on their facial expressions, you would have only a 50-50 chance of getting it right.

Seeing someone win Olympic gold and sharing a little in them reaching the pinnacle of their sporting existence is a truly glorious thing to see as a sports fan, but not in the men's under 55kg freestyle wrestling category.

Then it felt like intruding on someone's deep personal misery.

On the podium, the gold medalist, Russia's Jamal Otto Sultanov, could only be differentiated from the silver and bronze medalists by two things.

One, he was standing on a slightly higher step than the other guys, and two, he didn't have his head bowed in misery and shame.

He just looked as if he was contemplating an impending gastric operation.

Clearly a tough sport for tough people.

Played out to the backing music of Jump for My Love by Girls Aloud, which in a game is marked by inappropriate musical interludes, stood in gloriously unapt contrast to the grim-faced struggle of the the sport.

And also played out to the backing of the ubiquitous Barbara Streisand song by no idea and I can't really be asked to check, but I do know that the background to that song being used in the wrestling schedule was that Streisand was discovered by a Hollywood talent agent when wrestling in the Uzbekistan National Championships in 1961.

It was very different though in the 74kg category won by the American Jordan Burroughs with a victory over the Iranian Sadeh Gudazi.

And if Ottos Alturnov looked when he won his gold as if he'd just won a complimentary trip to the dentist, Burroughs was appropriately gold-medalistically exuberant, dancing around the wrestle arena, waving the stars and stripes, before Pat catching his way into the crowd to hug what I assume was his family, but could, I guess, have just been randomly selected members of the public.

That looked more like what winning an Olympic gold medal must feel like, and I imagine that after that, there were some very amusing text messages exchanged between Barrack Abama and Mark Mudama dinner chat.

Very amusing, and possibly leading to a war.

Beautiful, beautiful times.

There will be, of course, another London 2012 tribute in Los Angeles in four years' time.

Now, next week on the Bugle Our Sub-episode will bring you the best of the year so far.

Goodbye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.