Good

The family and I went out to watch the Olympic women’s cycling road race yesterday.

We watched them zip past on the way out of town, and then I stuck around to wave them back again in the hammering rain.

I really enjoyed it—you don’t get to see a great deal, but cheering people on in the rain gives you an uplifting sense of communal goodwill. Good crowd too, for two seconds of action on such a wet day.

Not so good

Linking to a photo on the Guardian website from Mike Blake of Reuters:

These soldiers, who were presumably in the Olympic park on security duty, have been called in to fill some of the premium seats left empty in an artistic gymnastics session. Other under-attended events at the weekend included swimming and diving sessions.

Gymnastics! Diving! You can be certain these events were over-subscribed with the general public.

As far as I can tell, the picture above is from the GA004 session on Sunday morning. That’s a session that we tried to get tickets for in the initial round of applications over a year ago. But, just as with all the other things we applied for in that round, we failed.

Still, looking on the bright side—those guys up there definitely deserve the seats more than the people they were actually allocated to.