Up up and away: The balloon rides over the Olympic siteThe idea was to go up in a hot air balloon for a bird's-eye view of an Olympic Games that is being born out of the soil of east London.
The bursts of flame above the basket were so fierce they almost singed your scalp, but the wind was blowing and elevation was difficult to achieve. We rose a couple of feet and fell again. Five feet and fell again.
At best, we were 20 feet up for 10 seconds and then down, knees bent to absorb the lop-sided landing.
As for the Olympic Park below, it is rising steadily and inexorably. Observed later from a static high platform, the balloon abandoned, the scene is a picture of bustling yet ordered activity. A city within a city. A fleet of bendy buses snake their way around, ready to transport a workforce approaching 8,000 through a site twice the size of Heathrow's Terminal Five or almost exactly the equivalent of Hyde Park.
Hard-hatted staff busy themselves. Cranes and concrete mixers, flashing yellow lights and Day-Glo jackets abound. But there are no longer so many newts in the vicinity. Four thousand of them, along with 300 common lizards and 100 toads, have been moved to new habitats off the park.
Over to the right as you look at the development, with Victoria Park to your back, is the Olympic Stadium. Seats are going in at the rate of 700 a day towards its capacity of 80,000. The first race of this Olympics is already under way: a private duel between the stadium and the velodrome to be completed first. Word is that the velodrome got off to a flyer but the stadium is catching up well.
Between the velodrome - capacity 6,000 - and the stadium is the 12,000-seat basketball arena, all white and crinkled like a duvet. It was put up in the space of eight weeks. Special lights will illuminate it during the Games when they open in two years time.The aquatic centre, with its two 50m pools and 25m diving tank, will have a capacity of 17,500 during the Games and 2,500 afterwards. It has 768,000 tiles in all and a fabulous, wave-like roof. All of the park is expected to be ready by next summer, with championships and scout jamborees and the like putting it to the test before the world comes calling.
Louis Smith, who won a gymnastics bronze medal in Beijing, was up with us in the balloon, putting his hands over his head to shield himself from the heat. It was his first visit to the place since it was no more than a rubble heap and he liked what he saw.
'It's iconic,' he said. 'The stadiums are absolutely fantastic . The atmosphere will be amazing. In Beijing most of the people could not speak English and they were docile. But here it is going to be through the roof. Unbelievable.
High hopes: Louis Smith, Tash Danvers and Tim Branbants in the balloon'I remember when it was announced that London had got the Games, I thought it would be good. But you don't really get a feeling of exactly what it's going to be like until you get here. I was coming over on the bus today and I was thinking, "It's actually going to be here".'
All well and good for the athletes, some will say, but what a waste of more than £9bn on a few weeks of sport in these straitened times.
The naysayers should be apprised of a few facts: this is the redevelopment of brown-field land, with 45 hectares of wildlife created, thousands of trees, plants and bulbs planted.
There are 10,000 businesses involved. There are hundreds of workers, one in 10 of whom was previously unemployed, benefiting from apprenticeships and training. That is without talking about returns from tourism.
On a philosophical level, the doubters should ponder some of the principles central to the Olympic ideal and to our national story. Think of 1948, the last time London staged the Games. Rations on food, petrol and clothing were still in place after the war. But on a shoestring budget, London housed 4,000 athletes from around the world.
Looking forward: Lord Coe The spirit of London and the country was lifted to such an extent that organisers of this year's event have been given a fillip by meeting those who witnessed or competed in the Games 62 years ago and still speak fondly of the experience now.
Sport's invigorating qualities chimed with a slowly brightening mood across Britain.
It was the year the present Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, announced she was pregnant with the baby we know as Prince Charles.
The NHS was also starting to deliver. The Olympics - even if they are bound occasionally to fall short of Baron Pierre de Coubertin's highest ideals that they should be a means of bringing peace to the world - can act as panacea. They can provide heroes to look up to.
Sport, as so the Olympics, can also instill discipline. That idea, in its guise as muscular Christianity, underpinned the work of Thomas Arnold, the great Victorian headmaster of Rugby School.
He believed that organised games, especially cricket, could help cultivate modern civilisation. 'A straight bat' and all that. Arnold applied his creed to the gentleman class.
But Lord Coe, chairman of the 2012 organising committee, sees the lessons sport can teach and the opportunities it can bring applying at least as readily to the disadvantaged as to the privileged.
'I think sport is the hidden social worker in all our communities,' he said. 'It can reach places that very few things can. I know that from my Haringey athletics days, when people I trained with were brought up in and around the Broadwater Farm Estate.
'Inner-city sports clubs provide maybe the only role models in their lives. You can go to an athletics club on a Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday morning - they might be the only three anchor points for some people all week. We must never underestimate the role of the Games to help that.'
It is an inspiring dream being built in concrete before our eyes.
source: dailymail
