GAMES

“He was getting his blocks ready and warming up and as he came up to me, he gave me 'knuckles’ — our hands tapped each others and then as he stripping to his running kit, I said: 'I like your hat’ and he said: 'Would you like it?’

“I replied: 'yes please’. He handed it over there and then. And as he did so, the crowd went a bit mad because they saw him give it to me.”

The cap, with Jamaica and London 2012 written on it, will now be framed and kept for ever. George, from South Woodford, in Essex, is a county standard, middle distance runner. His name was put forward by his coach at the start of the year and after a series of trials, George was selected for the volunteering team.

“Bolt was just really nice, really friendly. Like a normal person,” said George.

“I was lucky I got him in a heat. I think he would have been more focused in a final.”

Niki Fisher

Lifeguard at the aquatics centre

It may seem odd that the world’s best swimmers and divers need lifeguards. But the London 2012 pools are no different from leisure centres up and down the country. Events can’t take place without rescue swimmers at the ready.

Mr Fisher is one of a team of about 150 lifeguards on duty at the various aquatic pools used for diving, swimming and water polo. For him, it has been the greatest honour and vindication of years of training.

“Obviously they are world class athletes,” said Mr Fisher, “But there is always the potential for every eventuality.”

He is a duty manager at a leisure centre in Bexleyheath, south-east London, who built up days in lieu and added it to his annual leave to work at London 2012 for free.

Mr Fisher, 28, who lives in Eltham in south London, said: “I just really wanted to be part of the Olympics. Yesterday I turned up for my work shift at the leisure centre wearing my volunteer’s uniform and they went: 'wow. You are actually doing it. I can now say I am an Olympic lifeguard. That is special.”

Stefan Kunstmann

Volunteer at Weymouth with responsibility for VIP guests

Mr Kunstmann’s abiding memory of these Olympics will be the Duchess of Cambridge asking him where to find the tea bags and milk so she could make herself a cup of tea.

At the time the Duchess was aboard the 52-ft motorboat chartered by the Olympics organisers to allow VIPs the chance to witness the sailing at close quarters.

Mr Kunstmann’s role, unpaid of course, has been to look after the dignitaries and explain to them the rules of Olympic sailing and what is going on while they watch.

“The Duchess was incredibly nice and totally normal,” said Mr Kunstmann.

“She was not what you might expect. Kate even made her own tea. She asked me where to find certain things like milk. She didn’t ask me to get the teas in and that was really funny.” Prince Philip enjoyed his first day at sea so much he came back the next, while David Cameron, the Princess Royal and Ben Ainslie, the most successful Olympic sailor of all time, were also looked after by Mr Kunstmann, 33, who grew up in Germany but now lives in London.

A professional yachtsman, Mr Kunstmann worked at the games for three weeks unpaid. With the Duchess on board, a boat carrying photographers was getting too close and his job was to signal to the vessel to keep its distance.

“The Duchess joked that they were trying to get a bikini shot. I had to laugh about that.”

Helen Flooks

Assistant to the South Korean team Mrs Flooks, 51, has been cheering every gold. But not those won by Team GB but by the Koreans instead. She has been assigned to the Korean Olympic committee, assisting them despite speaking no Korean.

“The best thing is I feel like part of the Korean team,” said Mrs Flooks, from Rode near Bath, who has left her husband at home while she volunteers in London.

“They are so nice and welcoming and friendly. I am learning all about their culture. I’m not really interested in Team GB. Even when Team GB was winning all the golds,, I just wanted Korea to win.”

She has made friends for life and her favourite moment was being presented with an honorary Korean team track suit which she is “really proud to wear” — although not during working hours when she must don her volunteer uniform.

Mrs Flooks has always been keen on sport and she and her husband run a specialist company dealing involved in cycle racing. She has taken time off from work to help out for free, immersing herself in Korean culture and enjoying the specially brought in Korean version of the Pot Noodle, which athletes and officials alike prefer.

Emma Sulley

Volunteer physiotherapist at the aquatics centre

Miss Sulley, who lives in Australia, flew half way round the world at a cost of about £1,000, paid out of her own pocket, to volunteer for the Games.

A trained physiotherapist, her primary role has been to dispense treatment to the one hundred or so teams at the Olympics who cannot afford to bring their own medical back up.

In all, there have been about 1,500 volunteer physios and medics across the Games. She gives massages and sorts out soft tissue injuries, preparing athletes before and after competition.

Miss Sulley, 34, from Perth, signed up for the Games three years ago but quit the UK in January to return home only to come back again.

“My favourite moment was being asked to treat the Team GB water polo team.

It was such an honour.”

Marie Johnson

Volunteer at the Olympic stadium looking after the athletes

Ms Johnson, who lives in Hackney — one of the Olympic boroughs — didn’t want to watch the games on television and didn’t want to be a 'bit part’ player.

A former England schools sprinter, the 53-year-old took two weeks off work as a family therapist , she was desperate to help. She has spent the past week guiding the athletes from the warm-up track and into the stadium to compete.

Two volunteers are assigned to each athlete and a complex process is gone through from first call on the warm-up track to final call beneath the stadium.

The timetable of events is precision run and the volunteers play a critical role in getting the athletes into the stadium with the correct numbers on and sorting out any last minute problems, such as escorting them to the toilets before competition.

Her highlight is escorting Jessica Ennis into the stadium on the night she won gold while her abiding memory is the moment Usain Bolt gave a young volunteer his cap.

“As Usain was stripping off to compete, he took off his hat and gave it to this young person. The boy was grinning from ear to ear.”

Carol Gordon

Ms Gordon, 50, has been involved in coaching volleyball — the indoor variety rather than the beach one — at a national level for almost a quarter of a century and jumped at the chance to volunteer for the Games.

It has been her dream come true and she hopes that British volleyball can use this as a springboard for future success.

Based at Earl’s Court, Ms Gordon’s role is to look after the athletes, learning all the time from the world’s best and hoping to transfer some of that knowledge when she returns to her unpaid day job as coach of England’s under-16 volleyball squad.

Ms Gordon, who lives in London and is about to start a new job at an elite sports academy on the south coast, said: “I meet and greet the athletes and we look after them from the moment they arrive. The highlight for me was meeting the world’s best volleyball player Kim Yeon-koung. She is a phenomenal all round player.”

By Robert Mendick

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

As Lord Coe hailed it as the best week of track and field he had ever watched, it really did feel as if athletics, a sport which has been struggling for so long to keep its head above water, embroiled in doping scandals and losing its credibility in the eyes of an increasingly underwhelmed public, was making a stirring comeback, grabbing back its rightful place on centre stage as the premier Olympic attraction.

You could easily convince yourselves that the Olympic titles, earned amid 80,000 ecstatic cheers by Farah, Jessica Ennis and Greg Rutherford in a fantasy 44 minutes, were the biggest prizes any British athlete carried off during the fortnight simply because of the sheer bewildering spread of competition in athletics.

For, extraordinarily, no fewer than 41 different countries won medals in athletics at these Games, including 23 which struck gold. In comparison, only 19 countries won medals in the swimming pool and 18 in the rowing at Dorney. This illustrates that, along with football (which was not being played for the game’s ultimate prize here at the Olympics) athletics is still the great democracy of world sport.

It was the one event in London where you could find yourself being beaten for gold by anyone. By a Trinidadian javelin thrower. Or a men’s 4 x 400m relay squad from the Bahamas. Or a woman triple jumper from Kazakhstan. Or a male race walker from China.

Over 11,500 miles, from New Zealand’s Valerie Adams in the shot (promoted “speechless” to gold after the doping disqualification of Belarussian champion Nadzeya Ostapchuk) to Algeria’s 1500m champion Taoufik Makhloufi, you could find athletes from 70 nations stretching far over all five continents either in a final or in the top eight.

So when Coe called Farah’s double triumph “an achievement of extraordinary magnitude”, he was not kidding.

The whole world runs distance races; no less than 15 men have sped under 13 minutes for 5,000m alone this season while another 30 have cracked a brutal 27min 30sec for 10,000. That is a measure of how tough it was for Farah.

When you have stellar performances, like David Rudisha’s sublime 800m world record, teenager Kirani James’s one-lap demonstration and Bolt’s golden treble, added to such tours de force from the home stars, you have a recipe, completed by stirring in 80,000 fans a day, which athletics would kill to find again.

“It’s got to be built on,” said Coe, who should take the reins of the International Association of Athletics Federations after Lamine Diack’s retirement. “This should be our template. That when we present track and field well, it can be, in the eyes of the public, as exciting and competitive as any other sport. I think what we have done here is fulfil the potential of track and field.”

London, from British sporting folklore to Trindidadian fairytales, has led the way. Now the IAAF must surely follow the dream weaver Coe.

By Ian Chadband, Chief Sports Correspondent

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

"I am very happy with silver. I just have to work hard over the next four years to win in Rio because every athlete's goal is to win a gold medal.

"The plan was to win gold, but I am happy at my first Olympics to be on the podium. I am still young. If I focus on training hard I can achieve more.

"You learn by mistakes and next time we'll do better. I tried hard to get back there, but the body wasn't really on fire today. I had to fight until the end.

"I see a pretty good future for me. The most important thing is to train, I just have to focus on my career and forget about the past."

Savinova, who beat Semenya to the world title last year, was also surprised by how Semenya ran her race.

"She (Savinova) told me I did a good job, but why did I move so late," said Semenya.

"She was expecting more of me after the semi-final. But you never know what's going to happen in a race."

By Telegraph Sport

Source: www.dailytelegraph.co.uk