Fire and Ice

During my stint as a Paralympic Gamesmaker (more on that soon, I promise) I learned that Fiji had only sent one athlete to the games. This apparently random bit of information stuck in my mind (mainly because I do know someone from Fiji!) but a few days into the games I learned that this athlete – a one-legged high-jumper – had achieved a gold medal.  Amazing. In  my commercial mind, this means that Fiji achieved a 100% success rate in terms of ROI: they invested in one athlete at the Games and came back with one gold. Job done. This led me to wonder if other countries had done the same. I mean, it was only by chance that I knew that Fiji had one athlete AND that this guy had won gold. Let’s face it: the TV coverage was very GB-centric so stuff like this just seems to have gone by unnoticed.  So I decided to do a bit of research into the datasets I needed and worked on some simple analysis with these numbers. I defined 'success' as the ratio between number of a...

At last – at long last the day was here, when I would find out what Delegation I would be working with, as well as some of the other Games Makers in my team. This was the session I had been waiting for practically since I signed up . As the content was nation-specific, we didn’t have a choice of dates for this module as we had had for previous, which meant traipsing across London on a Thursday afternoon, having to take an afternoon off work and resulting in a very, very long day. But who cares, we would finally be told what team we would be rooting for, so off I went with a spring in my step. The one good thing about doing the journey mid-week was that public transport is much more reliable and dependable then. I got to the venue with very good time and was able to chat with a few Games Makers prior to the start of the event. We were all just as excited as each other about the session. When we arrived we knew that the dates were based on Continent so after a few conversatio...

On 15 September 2010 not only was I getting ready to celebrate Mexican Independence Day but I also submitted my application to be considered a volunteer for the 2012 London Olympics. It was a long application, which actually took me a few days to complete, and I had to provide quite a lot of detail on myself, my skills, my interests, my strengths and of course my personal details. It was pretty complicated and I had to keep finding out stuff like my passport number and so on.   Ever since that day when London was announced as the venue for the 2012 Olympics I knew that I had to try my hardest to be a part of the event, somehow. Being a volunteer (or Games Maker as they are known) was the most obvious choice so I made sure my application was as thorough and detailed as I could make it. I finally submitted it on that September day and crossed my fingers that it would be good enough to get me an interview. It was a long wait but finally I got the news I was hoping to get in Ma...