Tuesday at the stadium

Another day, another early start and trip to the Holy Grail, ie the Olympic Park. A greyer morning, but still enjoyed a potter about, starting with the rather attractive water polo arena, which is sadly a temporary venue which will disappear after the games

 The basketball arena is also coming down. It rather disappears against a grey sky.



BP Pavilion



Samsung pavilion

Wenlock (or is it Mandeville?)

 The velodrome offers nice geometric almost abstract shapes.

 But the cleverest part of the park to my mind is not all the buildings, but sowing all the river banks with wild flowers. If this were a football stadium no doubt a pile of drunks would have flattened the lot, but these were respected and enjoyed by the sports fans.

 The flowers also nicely set off Orbit

In the middle of the park, at the side of a brdge linking the main arenas to the more far flung basketball, hockey and cycling venues, are the BBC studios. From here they can interview athletes against a backdrop of the stadium or milling crowds. As I passed by they were asking Beth Tweddle inane questions about how good it was to win a medal.

Of course the main business of the day was to watch some athletics. Not a great morning for team GB. it soon became obvious that Goldie Sayers' recent injury was too serious for her to make a decent challenge in the woman's javelin.

Less of a surprise was Phillips Idowu's failure to qualify in the triple jump, having barely competed all season.

And Barbara Parker, despite some fast times in the States, failed to qualify in the women's 5000m, although Bleasdale and Pavey both came through despite their sterling efforts in the 10,000m the previous Friday.

Note some people had a rather better camera angle, and rather better camera, than me for recording the races!

We also saw Usain Bolt almost stroll to the end of the 200m heats. He arrived wearing the sort of clothing you might want in the Arctic rather than a somewhat ropey summer morning in London. His main rival Yohan Blake (alias" the Beast") had a good run too. Christian Malcolm qualified for team GB, but James Ellington did not. He had just run out of form at the wrong time, and young Danny Talbot (who had medalled at Helsinki but hadn't got the qualifying time) would I am sure have made a better fist of it if he had been picked.

On a personal note, I had a pretty bad first hour. Why? Well I had a spare ticket for the next day's heats, or I thought I had. I was going to be taking a friend's 13 year old, for which we had made a number of arrangements. But as I sat there on the Tuesday morning, in an absolutely packed stadium, the only empty seat appeared to be next to me. Oh god, I couldn't have got the day's mixed up could I and it was this morning's heats I had a spare ticket for? Surely not. But then again, it surely couldn't be a coincidence that the only empty seat in the house was next to me. I was calculating that the emergency plan B was to get some friends who were coming to take the young lad with my seat, since I couldn't disappoint him, when after about an hour this American bloke wandered in and took the seat. rarely have I been so pleased to see someone, even a dumb American who had little interest in the athletics and had to keep asking how many laps there were, in interludes between calls on his mobile.