Category Archives: Olympics

2012 Olympic Games

Posted on March 1, 2011 by cintaduapuluh

Are you planning on going to the London 2012 Olympics? Well if you are then you need to get a ticket and at the minute that may not be so easy.

The first wave of tickets that were issued allowed you to bid for tickets over a six-week window. You could bid for as many sessions and as many tickets as you liked. The only stipulation being that if you got all of the tickets that you applied for you were legally obliged to buy them all. So if you applied for £5,000 worth of tickets and by some lucky chance managed to get them all then you needed to have £5,000 on hand when it came to paying.

The problem and the thing that most people have found most annoying was that the money was not taken off of your Visa card straight away; it was only taken several weeks later, and even then you had to wait several more weeks after the money was taken out in order to find out what tickets you had actually got.

This led to a somewhat annoying situation of people having money taken out of their accounts without a clue as to what tickets that they had been successful in getting.

Many people applied for far more tickets than they needed on the assumption that they would only get a fraction of the ones they wanted, and indeed this has proved to be true with many people applying for around £2,000 of 2012 tickets only to get just £120 worth.

The opening ceremony and closing ceremony, as well as the major athletics finals were massively oversubscribed resulting in many people missing out. Indeed over 250,000 people that applied got no tickets at all in the first ballot.

There was then a second chance to buy tickets but only open to those who had got none in the first wave. However this second wave of tickets was released on a first come first served basis, this time however people only had to wait 48 hours to know what tickets they had got, and they could only apply for three sessions, which seems much fairer and has left many people asking the question why no limit was put on the number of applications in the first wave.

Overall this process has left many people frustrated and ticketless, with stories of some people getting all the allocation they wanted including opening ceremonies as well as 100m finals, leaving many people questioning how fair the process was. London 2012 now faces a battle to win back public credibility.

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Olympian Translation Needs

Posted on February 13, 2011 by cintaduapuluh

With the next Olympic Games looming in 2012, and London frantically trying to prepare itself for an invasion of tourists, athletes and spectators a question which might not be oft considered is that of translation. For the Beijing Olympics in 2008 the Chinese invested both time and money (perhaps not enough!) into providing English translation for the Olympic visitors. However, although many improvements were made to new and existing translations the overriding preference for quantity and price over quality and accuracy was fairly obvious. ‘Chinglish’ translations were still appearing on billboards, shop signs and menus despite best efforts to remove embarrassing mistakes. Anyone who has visited China will smile in recognition at this point, as they will have undoubtedly come away with several pictures of amusing signage- invariably with one or more ‘toilet gags’.

It seems the huge demand for translation and interpretation from human translators during the Beijing Olympics was supplemented with the unreliable likes of Google Translate or other machine translation tools. Preparing itself for 2012 is one ginormous task for London in terms of improving infrastructure and ensuring the event for millions of spectators is not a disaster. Translation and interpreting services may come further down the list after developing tube lines and building stadiums, but it is still hugely important to the functioning of the games.

The official languages of the Olympic Committees and, therefore, the Games are French and English, and (if applicable) the host country’s language. Fortunately, as English is the 2012 host country’s language every announcement made during the Games will only be made into 2 languages and not 3, which will speed up the proceedings considerably. Although there will ‘officially’ only be requirements for interpreters and native speakers of French the other 215 countries taking part in the 38 sporting disciplines will need their own translators and interpreters out of English both for the media coverage and for the competing athletes. This could be a very lucrative time for freelance interpreters and English translation providers interested in sport.

Moreover, it is not only sport specific translation and interpreting services that will be in demand. London’s restaurants, hotels and tourist attractions are gearing themselves up for the extra 500,000 visitors expected to flock to the capital next summer. Menus, leaflets and websites are all being translated so that the visiting Olympic fans can enjoy London’s sightseeing and gastronomic delights.

One thing is for sure the London 2012 Olympic Committee should learn from the Chinese example and invest in reliable language service providers for their translation requirements. This will ensure that the only red faces during the Games belong to the medal winning athletes and not the host nation’s event organisers.

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The All-Africa Games

Posted on January 7, 2011 by cintaduapuluh

The All Africa Games were conceived by the founder of the modern Olympic Games in the 1920s, but it would be 1965 before the first games were actually held. The first games took place in Congo and more than 2500 athletes from 30 countries participated. United Arab Emirates took the most medals home from those first games in Brazzaville.

The second round of games was canceled due to a military coup in the country it was set to be held in. The next games were held in 1973, in Lagos. After a few false starts before the 1987 All-Africa Games, the games have been held every four years to present day. The 2011 games will be held in September, in Maputo, Mozambique.

Since the first games, Egypt has taken home top medals from the games four times. South Africa won top honors twice. Overall Egypt has won 1079 medals at the Games. Nigeria, South Africa, Algeria and Tunisia round out the rest of the top five overall medal winners. The lowest awarded medal count belongs to Guinea-Bissau, who won a solitary bronze in 1999.

There have been 32 sports played at the Games. This year, 26 are planned for play including football, squash, swimming, badminton, basketball, hockey and boxing. A new addition for this year is chess. Rowing is planned to be held at the Mindolo Dam.

This year, Nigeria has qualified for the games after beating Ghana at football. Egypt and Madagascar have also qualified, and Mozambique was automatically qualified as host country. Qualifications for football, arguably the most popular sport represented at the Games, are still underway.

The buildings for the games have been under construction for more than three years now, since Mozambique was given the honor of hosting the All-Africa Games. Portugal has donated 150 million dollars toward construction of the game village. The Chinese built the stadium for the games. The stadium will hold 42,000 people and is the biggest sports stadium built in Mozambique.

The Young Warriors of Zimbabwe play for their late coach, Fabisch, after losing him to cancer in 2008, and for their earlier losses at the All-Africa Games. They are said to play as a family, and look as strong as the earlier team of 1991.

One remarkable feature of the All-Africa Games is that it incorporates the Paralympic athletes as well. Anita Foudjour won medals for wheelchair track in 2007. Like many other African para-athletes, she was crippled by polio.

The top chess qualifiers for 2011 are Olamide Ajibowo and Nsisong Bassey of Lagos. Chess may seem an unlikely addition to the sports event, but avid fans are eager to see how an African competition will level up to the world stage.

In September 2011 the All-Africa Games will be held in Mozambique. Qualifying trials are presently underway, with athletes in more than 30 countries striving for the honor of representing their nation at the Games this year. The new stadium and athlete’s village promise smooth accommodations for the competitors and attendees alike. Fans and press from around the world will flock to see the Games and record this year’s glorious moments of athleticism.

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One Year To Go Til Oscar’s Olympics!

Posted on December 15, 2010 by cintaduapuluh

July 27th 2011 – one year until the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics, and as good a time as any to write about one runner in particular…

On 19th July 2011, he ran 45.07 for the 400 metres at a meeting in Italy. That qualified him to run in the 2012 Olympics. Ok, good for him, but many many others have qualified, and many other will qualify. So, what makes him stand out? Well, his name’s Oscar Pistorius, and he doesn’t have legs.

His legs were amputated between the knee and ankle when he was 11 months old, so he’s never really known life to be any different. A such he has never considered himself disabled, he just considered himself as him.

A keen and promising sprinter, in 2007 he began competing in races against able bodied athletes, using special blades. In a sport which has a record of political intrigue, it took no time for the governing body, the IAAF, to take notice. In the same year they changed their rules to disallow any athlete using a device which gave an advantage to other athletes not using the device.

They said it was unrelated to Pistorius, but not many people believed that. Pistorius challenged the ruling, and it went all the way to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, who overturned the decision. He was now allowed to compete in the 2008 Olympics, but fell just short of the qualifying time.

Pistorius’ story was now well in the public domain, and he campaigns for disabled people to be viewed and treated the same as able bodied. He is happy to be known as ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘the fastest man on no legs’.

He constantly advocates ‘life without limitations’ and says we should not be judged or held back by disability, rather we should be judged by and use our abilities instead.

Impressive? I think so.

The 400 metres is often called the ‘man killer’ of athletics, because it’s a vicious combination of the shorter sprints and the longer middle distance races. The lungs need to have a certain capacity for anyone to be able to do it at the highest level.

Any 400 metre runner has to put in years and years of work and training. Pistorius has had to put in the same amount of work and training, but has also had to battle against prejudice and politics.

Good for him I say. Will he win in London? Well his fastest time says that he won’t no, but surely for him the victory comes in simply qualifying in the first place

As an athlete he would surely wince at that comment, because he wants to win, but in this article I’m drawing the achievement lessons from the journey rather than one specific result.

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