In case you’ve been out of the country or have had your eyes and ears shut these past few weeks, London has hosted the 2012 Olympic Games and what a fortnight it has been. The coverage has been pretty immense and both through the television and radio waves and we have been hooked. Inspire a Generation…Inspire Roscoe and Rutter too!

We were lucky enough to get our hands on some Olympic tickets for London 2012 thanks to the Roscoe parents putting in a successful bid for the first night of Track and Field and we also picked up some tickets for the Women’s Team Foil Fencing event taking place at the Excel Arena.

It has to be said that we loved our Olympic experience. Starting with the fencing, which neither of us have any prior knowledge of we just liked the thought of getting to one of the lesser known Olympic sports. En-route we were greeted with Thai tourists eagerly anticipating one of their top table tennis players, always drawn to a group shot we couldn’t resist sneaking one there and then.

In the Excel arena Boxing, Judo, Table Tennis and Badminton were all taking place with more events going on there in the second week of action. Within the fencing competition we saw lots of competitive action too and Team GB were out in force attempting to go through the rounds. Fencing is tough to follow but we could tell who were the favorites  through the rounds with Italy and France having the most International support in the crowd. Happening in the Excel arena that day also saw an epic Judo silver medal from Team GB’s Gemma Gibbons, so there was a lot of buzz at Excel throughout.

The next day we were so excited to be taking our turn at the Olympic Athletics Stadium accompanied by Jan and Den (Helen’s parents). We’d been staying in Bromley for a few days and were very pleased with the transport links, the underground ran smoothly all around central London and the free Zone 1-9 railcards which came with the tickets were well used. For our final night we opted to camp with the parents out in Theydon Bois. A campground that is right next to the train station and a 25 minute ride to the Olympic Park. Perfect.

Once we were in the Olympic Park we were greeted by a pretty slick security procedure and thousands of people doing the same, so another thumbs up on that side of things too. The amount of people in the park was amazing, quite overwhelming and the buzz was so exciting. We managed to explore the park pretty well walking towards and around many of the other sporting venues finishing our stroll in Park Live where a large double sided screen attracted even more thousands of people checking out the action in the velodrome. For some people this was where they would watch the action from. Perhaps our biggest criticism about the park was that they could have done with more screens around as there were big queues for getting into Park Live, which at peak times operated on a one-in-one-out basis.

At 6pm we made our way to our seats in the Olympic Stadium, spotting Catherine Merry on the way in doing her bit for Five Live Sport. We were quite high up in the stadium with seats pretty much opposite the 100m finish. After the initial excitement and photographs of us in there surrounded by nearly 80,000 others doing the same we started to enjoy the action. Greg Rutherford was going in the long jump qualifying, little did we know we were watching a champion in the making and also Jess Ennis competed in both the shot put and 200m as part of her Olympic winning performance. It was all quite overwhelming at times and Helen had to fight back a few tears each time the roars from the crowd got behind a home athlete, especially Ennis, she is a little star!

We also saw the 100m qualifying rounds which saw race after race go under 11 seconds, fast!! The women’s discus qualifying took place and the men’s shot put final saw the heavy weights in action with the finishing event being the light-weights in the women’s 10,000m final. Never has a stadium applauded such an event on the first night of action. Jan and Den were in Athens and Beijing and were astounded by the support.

Our biggest annoyance was the use of music whilst competitors were trying to achieve their physical peak performance. Music pumping straight into the audience was just a little too much at times when trying to concentrate on a certain event. We appreciate that they were appealing to the mass audience who want to see a show, and perhaps this compensated a little for the price of tickets…who knows, surely the athletic performance is a show enough in itself? And why Ben Sheppard was there…it’s not X-Factor, this is the Olympic Games!

Taking this aside we were thrilled with our Olympic experience and wanted to go again and again to support the athletes from around the world, competing at the highest level. This is something to be admired and we felt proud that the British pulled off a fantastic games, a wonderful Olympic Park and look at where we finished on the medal table, fourth, wow! Not bad for a country of 60 million!

In September we’re back in the Olympic Stadium for the Paralympic closing ceremony and in between we may try to sneak in a few tickets for Paralympic action, which is set to have more of a following than in any other Paralympic Games in history.

We were pretty excited about the fact that we’d pre-booked some ground passes for the mighty Aussie Open Tennis Championship and on the 27th we were there to support our very own Andy Murray and on the finals night who knows what would happen. Its always the case when you get to a big event trying to find your bearings and suss out whats going on and where and so we feel that we didn’t really get the best from our ground passes. However we did some an impressive female wheelchair doubles tennis final which was really good and definitely an interesting display to watch and support. We also got a few games from some of the junior girls and boys semi-finals along with having a good old nosey around the stalls and took advantage of their free giveaways.

It was a really hot day to be out in the sun and so when we found out where Andy Murray would be warming up for the semi-final that night against Djokovic we decided to fight the un and got a really good spot to watch the practice. We waited….and waited…and more fans were gathering around, but after an hour and 15 we realised it wasn’t happening, Andy Murray had let us down, well not quite but it was a little annoying to be told this is where he would be and then only find out after so long that he was training elsewhere. It was too late by this point to find out where he was as we needed to find ourselves a spot to watch the match from. Fortunately for Helen we’d spotted Nadal practicing earlier on in one of the bigger courts, although he was a little far away she got very excited about seeing the star play.

We opted for the Garden City seating area which is behind the Rod Lever Arena, all the seats were taken by this point and so we found a little spot on the grass. The support for Murray was huge, we were really surprised to see lot’s of Scottish flags, face painted supporters and crazy wig wearing Scots. It meant there was a good atmosphere though and dotted around were a few Serbian supporters too. The main problem for us being where we were is that the atmosphere just didn’t quite get on board with the game as much as we thought it would, although the support was there it just wasn’t quite exciting enough and after a slow start from Murray it was pretty quiet. We have to admit we didn’t stay to watch the end of the match we we later learned was more intense and it was very close between the pair, but after Helen snoozed her way through a few games we decided to catch a train home before missing the transport links back to Glen Waverley. Murray just lost out in the end so we now knew that it was Djokovic and Nadal through to the final, it was going to be a good one!

For the finals night on the 29th it was a very different story for us indeed. We once again had ourselves a pair of ground passes which for $19 was really good value, the only thing that kept nagging us was that we knew how good it would be if we could be in the main arena. It was also easier as we were familiar with the set up and so we found ourselves taking advantage of the Dove stand which was giving away loads of goodies, so after stocking up we went for a mooch around the smaller courts. The same one where Nadal had been practising a few days before we spotted Djokovic getting ready for the big game, this was very cool indeed and so we stayed a while watching him play.

We started thinking about the big match and decided to ask if we would be able to upgrade our tickets to arena tickets, but only if there were 2 available for us so that we could be together. We were sent away at one point but the second time round they conveniently managed to find 2 tickets together and so we decided to bite the bullet and go for it, we would only be in this situation once. The cost was a sting to the wallets but we have been really budget conscious since arriving in Australia and this was our big activity. So into the arena we were and it suddenly we were watching live Doubles Finals tennis, a bit of a step up from where we were the other day.

It was a while before the Men’s Singles Final but the anticipation was immense with awards ceremonies, and music to get everyone in the mood. At 7.30pm the final was announced and before long Nadal and Djokovic were making their entrances. This was built up to be a fantastic match and it really didn’t let us down, it felt like the support was on Nadal’s side for much of the match but there was definitely enough admiration and support for Djokovic to keep him going. Nadal started out on fire and won the first set but then lost it for the next 2. We were getting worried as we knew that if we were to stay until the end of the match we wouldn’t make our train connections back that night and so we hoped for a 5 setter. It didn’t look like this was going to happen but halfway through the 4th set Nadal came back amazingly and took the 4th with a tie breaker. Yes!! We would be here for a little while yet.

The 5th set was equally entertaining and enthralling, we couldn’t believer the sheer power, strength and determination on display. Both men were fighting till the very end and their athleticism is one to be remembered for a very long time, not to mention the amount of pressure on them from the audience and millions of viewers world wide. Well we all know the ending, Djokovic won and came-back to take the 5th set and the title, we felt for Nadal but at the end of the day the best man won and we felt really happy with the fact that we’d witnessed 6 hours of tennis history. One for the records!!

The ceremonies and speeches mean’t that we didn’t leave the arena until after 2.30am which was good news for us as the first train back to our suburb was at 5.15am so we didn’t have too long to wait. Melbourne CBD felt pretty safe for us, a McDonalds was open 24 hours which helped for a while before we rested at the entrance to the train station. There were enough people around who were in a similar position to us so we didn’t feel too alone. Back in the comforts of our bed we slept for most of the next morning until lunch time and heading out to meet up with friends.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0, 18mm f4, 90mm Tele-Elmarit f2.8 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)