Olympic fever: Day 3 of my Olympic expedition

The official GSK experience was over, but I had Olympic fever!  Someway, somehow, I was going to get back to Olympic Park one last time.  Long story short, the fantastic folks at Team GSK managed to get a pair of women’s water polo tickets that another set of GSK attendees (Joe and Ed) purchased.  Since these guys also had tickets to cycling in the Velodrome, we were able to get into the park on one of their sets of tickets.

After a leisurely lunch at Tattershall Castle (a pub on a boat) with a UK-based fellow GSK employee (Graham) and one of LJ’s work colleagues, Simon, we headed back to the hotel to meet up with Joe and Ed and head over to Olympic Park.

What a difference a day makes.  Even as we were walking up to the park entrance, the crowds were much bigger than on Thursday.  There were various street performers, from the amusing (these tall guys on stilts) to the frightening (three men dressed as nannies, complete with baby buggies).  

Street performers at the Olympics

Thanks to the first day of track and field (athletics for the Brits), there were at least 80,000 extra spectators in the park, and probably much more.  On the previous night, we had been able to walk into the London 2012 Megastore but on Friday, the line was at least 30 minutes long just to get inside.  The Olympic fever was taking everyone by storm, with roars from the crowd washing over the park anytime Great Britain scored in the field hockey arena or Andy Murray took a game at Wimbledon (broadcast into the Park on one of the Park Live jumbo screens).

Crowds at Olympic Park

We had been hoping to get into an event on resale tickets again, but that’s where our luck ran out.  Whether by design or by luck, there were no resale tickets to be had for any events.  Instead, we grabbed at bite to eat at the world’s largest McDonald’s.

The world's largest McDonald's

We were starting to run out of time to get back to the hotel for our transfer to the airport, but before we left the park, I tried my hand at Olympic pin trading.

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For those of you who have never heard of Olympic training (a group in which I counted myself until last week), the competition of pin trading is almost as fierce as that of the sporting events. 

(If you really want to learn more, Coca-Cola has published a guide about its history.  Back in 1988, they recognized the brand value of being the Official Olympic Pin Trading Center, which they have been for both Summer and Winter Olympics since then. ) 

At the Megastore, I had picked up a few pins for the specific goal of trading them.  My dream pins would be ones from Australia and Ghana, the two foreign countries in which I’ve had the privilege to live.  I thought the Ghana one would be a long shot, but I lucked into finding a guy who had a bag of pins from the ’84 Olympics featuring Sam the Eagle, the official mascot.  When I told him I was looking for Ghana, he said that I would have to know what the flag looked like.  “Red stripe at the top, yellow stripe in the middle, green stripe on the bottom, with a black star in the center,” I responded.  

We dug through the pile and struck gold, finding what looked like the Ghana flag.  He turned the pin over to show the word “Ghana” engraved on the back.  I walked away close to (happy) tears as the proud owner of a Coca-cola pin with an American eagle hoisting a Ghana flag.

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After the excitement of the successful pin trading, we headed back to the Tube to start our long trek back to the US.  While my Olympic trip was drawing to a close, my Olympic fever had only begun.  The small taste of this London Olympics made me hunger for more.  I feel so fortunate to work for a company that gave its tickets to the Golden Ticket winners and their guests.  I only hope that GSK figures out a way to do the same thing for employees for the 2016 Games in Rio.