Mohamed Sbihi has described his selection in the men's eight boat for the London Olympics as "a dream".
The 24-year-old took up the sport nine years ago after being discovered through a talent identification scheme while at school in Surbiton.
He told BBC London 94.9: "An opportunity has become a dream and the dream has started to become a reality.
"I feel very fortunate. It's almost like a fairytale. If I hadn't gone into school that day, I wouldn't be here."
The Molesey Boat Club member was identified after British Rowing's World Class Start programme visited Hollyfield School in south west London.
"They wanted all the tall kids in the year to go to a special PE lesson," Sbihi added.
"I didn't really want to go because I wanted to play football but my PE teacher pulled me back and told me that as I was the tallest guy in the year, I had to go.
"Before I knew it, I was in the top four out of 10,000 kids who had been tested in our area. I didn't like it to start with but then it slowly hooked me.
"I feel honoured and proud to wear the GB flag. I have to thank everyone who has been involved in my development."
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
London hotels persist with Olympian price hikes - Daily Telegraph
This week JacTravel, which provides wholesale accommodation for inbound tour operators, said its London bookings were down by 35 per cent during July and 30 per cent during August, compared with the same months last year. By contrast, it said that bookings for summer holidays to Barcelona and Berlin had grown by more than 100 per cent.
JacTravel found that some four-star London hotels were charging up to £415 per night for stays during the Games, nearly four times more than usual.
A second hotel booking website, Hotels.com, found that the average price for a room during the Olympics had fallen slightly by five per cent since March, to £202. However, this is still 93 per cent more expensive than the same period last year.
A spokesman for Hotels.com said that some cheaper rooms could still be found if travellers were willing to look to outlying districts.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
London 2012 Olympics: Aaron Cook's Games dream over as BOA ratifies nomination of Lutalo Muhammad - Daily Telegraph
“The results are plain for everyone to see, he is world No 1, European champion and has beaten 10 of the top 15 athletes in the Olympic rankings in his most recent fights. It makes a mockery of the taekwondo -80kg competition in the London Olympics.”
Cook would have been selected if the criteria was on performance, one of the GB Taekwondo selectors, Dr Steve Peters, said. Peters sat in all three meetings but did not vote because he said his role was as an ‘athlete advocate’.
“We all agreed that if world ranking and success in tournaments were the only selection criteria, then Aaron would be selected as he’s an outstanding athlete who could get gold at the Olympics,” said Peters. “All we’re saying is that there are two athletes who can achieve this.”
Peters said Muhammad was ultimately chosen several compelling reasons: he was improving at a rapid rate, including a victory over Cook (although Cook beat his rival soon afterwards) and that his height and flexibility give him an advantage to double tap and earn extra points for headshots in fights.
“People have been confusing the issue, thinking there is something secret or underhand or another agenda and it is nonsense. The fact Aaron is working outside of the academy has never come into the meeting, it is not an issue,” said Peters.
However the BOA has reserved the right to reconsider Muhammad’s selection – an unlikely situation – subject to the findings of an inquiry instigated by the World Taekwondo Federation. Last night Cook was considering his legal options.
The BOA chief executive Andy Hunt said: “After a thorough review, the panel is now sufficiently satisfied that the agreed selection procedures have been followed, and it is on that basis we are ratifying the nomination.”
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
London Mayor Boris Johnson urges Toronto to 'go for' 2024 Olympics - huffingtonpost.ca
TORONTO - A surprise city council decision Friday to consider bidding for the 2024 Summer Olympics was given a solid thumbs up from the mayor of London, whose own city is set to stage one of the world's greatest sports spectacles next month.
Boris Johnson said the Games leave lasting value, something he said will happen in his city.
"I think that's a great move," Johnson told The Canadian Press.
"Go for it, Toronto. You won't regret it if you get it."
Toronto has twice before thrown its hat into the Olympic ring — in 1996 and 2008 — only to be disappointed. It did not try for the 2020 event.
If a decision is made to try to land the Games in 2024, Johnson urged the city to "make a case" for staging them to the International Olympic Committee that goes well beyond the athletics.
"What the IOC wants to hear is that this is something that will be transformative for the life chances of people in your city," Johnson said.
"They want to feel that the arrival of the Olympics will be a great thing, not just for sport and for international sports bureaucrats and the global TV audiences, they want to hear about how it will be of huge social benefit in Toronto."
The games have already proven to be a benefit to people in London and will continue to be so in the future in terms of the economic investment and the impact of that investment, Johnson asserted.
"My job is now to get the yield, to get the return, to get the legacy value from that investment."
That legacy value is "jobs, jobs, jobs, homes, growth — that's what we're going to produce," he said.
The hope is also for the creation for a thriving new district around the Stratford Olympic Park and that regeneration will drive further investment in the Docklands area, he said.
The Summer Olympics formally open in London July 27 amid concern about moving the huge crush of people expected to attend around a city already known for its traffic jams.
Johnson said he was optimistic, however, the city would be ready to deal with the crowds, saying this month's Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations showed that to be the case.
"London is going to be as ready as we can make it," Johnson said.
"We're really looking forward to welcoming Canadians and the world in just a few weeks time now."
Johnson, who was in Toronto as part of a tour for his recently published book, said he would not have a chance to meet Mayor Rob Ford, who was not previously enthralled at the idea of bidding for the Games but backed council's motion on Friday.
Council's decision is preliminary, only instructing staff to examine the pros and cons of making a bid and report back next spring.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.ca
London 2012: Tickets For Olympics Opening And Closing Ceremonies Go On Sale - huffingtonpost.co.uk
More tickets for some of the most popular events at the Olympic Games go on sale today.
Thousands of tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as for athletics, swimming, boxing, table tennis, volleyball and football at Wembley Stadium, will be available through the official Olympic website from 11am.
Prices range from £20 to £720 across the 96 available sessions, while tickets for the two ceremonies start at £995.
All the remaining tickets, both for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, are on sale on a first come, first served basis, and more will be available in coming weeks.
As with previous tickets, they can only be bought using a Visa card.
Locog, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, said more than eight million tickets have now been sold across both games.
But there are still about three million tickets left up for grabs, including more than half a million Olympic tickets, 1.2 million Paralympic tickets and 1.25 million tickets for Olympic football.
Locog commercial director Chris Townsend said: "There are still plenty of ways to join in and be part of London 2012.
"We are at advance stages of venue planning and these represent the final release of ceremonies and other sport tickets tickets.
"Over the next few weeks we will release further tickets for other Olympic sports and keep people informed when tickets are available.
"We are delighted with ticket sales to date, and have sold another 1 million tickets in the last four weeks, prioritising people who were unsuccessful last time around."
For more information or to buy, visit www.tickets.london2012.com.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk
The Shard, London, view described as awesome! Defying vertigo, Robert Hardman climbed to the top of the highest building in Europe - Daily Mail
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The only other human beings any higher than me anywhere in Britain - or Europe for that matter - are in aircraft or up mountains. I really am the king of the castle up here.
In fact, I can see a castle down below but it looks so puny that its toy soldiers are invisible. It’s just the teeny-weeny Tower of London.
It’s a pity that haze has descended, because visibility today is down to just seven or eight miles. So I can see London’s Olympic stadium to the east, Hampstead Heath to the north. But on a really good day, you can see as far as Southend and the North Sea in one direction, Berkshire in the other.
This is the best view in Britain for those without helicopters. From up here, it really is the London of a Lilliputian miniature village
Sometimes, of course, this place is just too tall for its own good. During much of Sunday’s Thames Jubilee pageant, for example, it had its head in the clouds. Literally.
In a year or so, everyone will be able to come up here to the 72nd floor of The Shard, the European Union’s tallest building, and look down on the capital of the United Kingdom. For now, though, it is still work in progress.
Some poor soul has yet to clamber out and dismantle the crane which has just finished attaching the last steel girder to the top of this 1,016ft stalagmite. Inside its glass walls, a thousand workers are still beetling away on the wiring and plumbing.
But the outside is virtually finished. And a month from now, the red carpet will be unfurled for a grand royal inauguration. The Duke of York is coming to do the honours, along with the Prime Minister of Qatar, the tiny Gulf emirate which is busy buying London as a second home (the Stock Exchange, Harrods, the Olympic Village . . .).
The outside is virtually finished. And a month from now, the red carpet will be unfurled for a grand royal inauguration
This is the best view in Britain for those without helicopters. From up here, it really is the London of a Lilliputian miniature village.
You can stare at an empty road and see how quickly congestion breaks out. It only takes one van driver doing a spot of unloading. Who’d have thought that the metamorphosis of a traffic jam could be so absorbing?
At this altitude, you realise what a lot of boat traffic there is on the River Thames, how much green space there is in South London, how lots of red buses aren’t red on top.
The tranquillity is astonishing. The viewing deck is open to the elements, yet it sounds like the countryside — without birds. The pigeons don’t venture this high. Train-spotters and model railway enthusiasts will be glued to the comings and goings on the rail-sprawl below.
True, this thing would not greatly impress the average New Yorker. Plonk it in Manhattan and it would be just another face in the crowd. But, in Britain, it is monumentally different. It isn’t even finished and already has the ‘iconic’ tag slapped on it for evermore. You need only write ‘The Shard’ on an envelope and your letter will get here.
Considering the size of it — 32 acres of floorspace protruding from an area smaller than a football pitch — one might have expected more controversy. This is by far the most prominent landmark London has ever seen. There were certainly angry voices during the planning stages a decade back.
But while organisations like English Heritage argued that The Shard would diminish the dominance of other historic buildings, public opposition has never really taken off.
The Prince of Wales, who is not without views on architectural matters, has confined himself to the observation that it looks like ‘an enormous salt cellar’. ‘He hasn’t had much to say about us really,’ says Irvine Sellar, the man behind it. ‘But his brother, the Duke of York, has always been a great supporter.’
Sellar, 72, has been eating and breathing this project for 14 years now. He is the veteran property developer who bought Southwark Towers, an unprepossessing office block on the south bank of the Thames, in 1998.
And then he had a spot of luck. Within weeks, the Blair Government decided on a new policy of encouraging major new developments attached to transport hubs. And Sellar’s new building was slap bang on top of London Bridge Railway Station.
He decided not to go big, but huge. And he soon had the backing of the new Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
‘Luck is an evenly dispersed commodity, but you have to make the most of your opportunities,’ he says. As someone who built up one property empire and lost the lot — in the early Nineties — and then built another, Sellar knows about risk. ‘Back then, I had the Rolls-Royce, the plane, the big house and it was a long fall,’ he says. ‘But I had a few loyal friends, I got lucky with a couple of deals and if you have bad news and you’re fit and healthy, then you just have to say: “Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life”.’
Sellar’s first fortune was born out of Carnaby Street fashion in the Sixties and Seventies (his wife, Elizabeth, is a former model). His second fortune, rooted in commercial property, puts him in 395th place in the latest Rich List with an estimated worth of 190 million. London-born and bred, he divides his time between homes in London, Surrey and the Sussex coast. No bolthole overseas in the sun? ‘I’d never go there enough. It’s a waste of time.’
A tennis-mad grandfather who does not even include his birthday in the slimmest of Who’s Who entries, he doesn’t do politics and says London has been ‘very lucky’ to have both Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson as mayor. But he is no fan of the coalition system. ‘We need strong leadership,’ he says.
Having bought his plot at London Bridge, he wanted to plant something distinctive and historic on the skyline. But he says that, from the outset, aesthetics rather than size was the dominant factor. So, he recruited the distinguished Italian architect, Renzo Piano, an odd choice, perhaps, since Piano disliked tall buildings, finding them ‘arrogant’ and inaccessible.
But Piano saw the opportunity to do something new. The Shard is not a City skyscraper. It peers down on the bankers from across the water in the relatively deprived South London borough of Southwark. Piano took his inspiration from ships which used to populate the Thames and from the profusion of churches dotting the old London skyline. He wanted to create a new spire, but this one would be full of light.
Modern skyscrapers are rather like celebrities, always in sunglasses whatever the weather. This building would not be clothed in dark, reflective glass. The Shard would remove the shades.
In an early Press conference, while struggling to find the mot juste, Renzo Piano likened his vision to a ‘shard of glass’. The name stuck.
‘I wanted to call it LBT — London Bridge Tower,’ says Sellar. ‘But the marketing people talked me round. They said: “The Shard’s a great nickname. Let’s keep it”.’
Sellar says he wanted to build a ‘vertical town’ as opposed to an office block. The average skyscraper is all about cramming in the optimum number of worker bees. But if you set out to build something which includes offices, restaurants, a hotel and some very grand apartments, then each section will have different needs.
Hotel guests and residents need to look out of the window in a way that office workers don’t. Therefore, you make the residential floors smaller so that everyone is nearer the outside. Office grunts can stare at the wall. That’s why this thing tapers from a large base to a pointy top.
The fatter, lower section is all offices until three floors of restaurant space kick in from floors 31 to 33. Above that, it is a five-star Shangri-La hotel all the way to the 53rd floor. The upper section will be among the most expensive and unusual apartments in Europe — each with an estimated price of more than 30 million and a 360-degree view of the metropolis.
In a year or so, everyone will be able to come up here to the 72nd floor of The Shard, the European Union's tallest building, and look down on the capital of the UK
But the residents will still have the likes of you and me clomping around above them. Because floors 68 to 72 will be observation decks like the one I am on now. The uppermost levels (rising to the equivalent of a 95th storey) will house plant and machinery in what surely constitutes Britain’s most spectacular attic.
The very top consists of several shards of glass which simply taper off into thin air. This a clever optical illusion, since it fools the human eye into carrying on upwards, suggesting that the Shard is even taller than it actually is.
And so it would have been, had it not been for the Civil Aviation Authority. The original plan was for something 1,400ft tall, but the custodians of Britain’s skies decided this represented a hazard to air traffic. Piano’s plan was cut back to 1,000ft.
Needless to say, the process was not straightforward. Sellar was preparing his initial planning application when terrorists brought down the World Trade Centre on September 9, 2001. Suddenly, no one was keen on new skyscrapers. When he finally got his planning permissions, there were strings attached — not least a requirement to give the paying public the viewing platform on which I am now standing.
A full decade after Sellar had bought the site, he had not even started building when the 2008 banking collapse stopped the project in its tracks. Along came the Qataris with their bottomless shopping trolley and ended up with 80 per cent of the equity.
Even now, it is unclear who is going to rent all this office space or pay 30 million for a flat in Southwark. But London has plenty of bored trillionaire non-doms. The hotel portion of the tower has already been leased and there are said to be several takers for the various restaurant spaces.
It is self-evidently a bold addition to the London skyline. I like its originality. And it is an eloquent riposte to those dreary modernists who spent all last weekend moaning that Britain is stuck in the past. But there will be some people who hate it, just as many people regarded, say, St Paul’s Cathedral as an eyesore when it opened.
They might care to follow the example of the French writer, Guy de Maupassant, who hated the Eiffel Tower so much that he ate in its restaurant every day. When asked why, he explained that it was the only place in Paris where he didn’t have to look at it.
Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
Is it made of Steel hope not we don't want it falling down if a plane was to hit it do we
- Jocky, Uk open prison, 08/6/2012 23:36
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