OlympicTalk’s writers recount some of their favorite moments from the 2012 London Games.
Usain Bolt, McKayla Maroney, Mo Farah and many others stamped the Olympics with the indelible mark of their personalities, yet arguably the most entertaining person at the 2012 London Olympics wasn’t an athlete at all.
Boris Johnson, the beloved mayor of London, who apparently hates verbal and behavioral restraint as much as he does combs, started things off with awesome (inebriated?) dancing during the Opening Ceremony and proceeded to bandy about town saying and doing whatever he felt like, caring absolutely not at all what anyone thought.
He began by fervently dismissing the naysayers who predicted weather- and security-related doom prior to the Games, then gleefully touted his country and its Olympians with every chance he got, before displaying equal patriotic zeal for the Paralympics. He was so entertaining that it’s difficult to pick his most memorable moment from last summer.
His hilarious interview with David Letterman ranks pretty high, as do his Opening and Closing Ceremony dancing fits, the latter of which was the UK’s most tweeted event of 2012. His numerous off-the-cuff interviews during the Games were all great too, and this mash-up video – an unauthorized Olympic Welcome that splices together things that, for some reason, he’s intentionally said directly to a camera – which went viral just before the Games began, was pretty amazing.
But the absolute best moment of Boris Johnson’s London 2012 was when he attempted to zipline into a park full of Team GB Olympic fans, only to run out of momentum and be awkwardly suspended thirty feet in the air, a Union flag in each hand, for several minutes. Far from uncomfortable, he just joked with onlookers until he was brought down.
“If any other politician anywhere in the world was stuck on a zip wire it would be a disaster,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said of the incident. “For Boris, it’s an absolute triumph.”
