My London 2012 Olympic diary: Day 4

Day 4: Going back to your first love

I knew I would love everything about the Olympics, I have always been following them very closely. The furthest I can remember goes back to 1992 with Albertville hosting the winter Games a few months before the Olympic torch settled in Barcelona.

Every time, during two weeks, I could show what some consider as fanaticism others as madness, swallowing hundreds of hours of sports on television. Even the most surprising ones (yes I have a deep interest in curling and weightlifting every four years).

Despite this long lived love affair, one thing (wife and kid apart) easily makes my heart beat faster and has been doing it ever since I started to store childhood memories into my head : football.

The Olympic Games area huge event but overall football is bigger. And everybody has to agree on this. A football World Cup draws way much more passion (and money) than the Games can do.

What always got me sad is the fact that these two could not get along at all. The world football governing body, scared of losing some sponsorship deals to a top level Olympic football tournament, always did everything it could to make sure the football event of the summer Olympics remained quite uninteresting. Their main leverage to this extend is to forbid players over 23 years old to take part in the tournament. This way, they are making sure most of the best players in the world usually attracting crowds to the stadium are missing out on these tournaments.

Despite all this, I could not help but staying in love with football, even during the Games. This is why my combined passion for stadiums and the people's game led me to Wembley on this evening.

Following some shopping, a traditional east end curry lunch and a goodbye waving to Andrew's godfather, I was turning myself towards the biggest stadium of the island. Tonight, a women's semi final game was happening there with France facing Japan. As Alexia does not love football enough (yet) to join me when she does not have to and as the Wembley stadium policy about babies was a bit unclear, I would go there with Matteo, an Italian friend of us leaving in the Olympic city.

I already came once to the UK largest football venue but I was only here to start a ten kilometres race from the pitch. This time, I would discover it in my favourite configuration.

When the game was kicked off, I was very surprised to notice that large parts of the stands were completely empty. Later on the official count would prove me right with only the two third of the ninety thousand seats having people officially seating on. I knew that football tickets were not all sold for this tournament but believed apparently naïvely that a semi-final encounter would be sold out,

The women's display was interesting, full of will and energy. But even if their abilities improved considerably in the past 15 years or so, you cannot feel sad for the numerous technical and tactical mistakes still happening during the course of a top level game. Nonetheless, the pace of it added to the importance of such an encounter, made it very enjoyable to watch.

The scenario did help the crowd getting emotional though. At half time, the world champions were leading France by a single goal, thanks to a deadly mishandled ball by the French keeper.

A few beer and sandwich minutes later my friend and I came back to our seats just in time to witness the second goal scored by the Japanese. It was 2-0 even if both teams seemed to play on even terms so far.

The remaining 40 minutes would see the France team outrageously dominate its opponent, Japanese players never looked so tired and so small on the pitch. France was creating great chances every minute or so, the atmosphere was rising, even more following the French first goal with 15 minutes to go. Then I could tell for sure that there were more French fans in the stadium than Japanese or British or Swedish (Sweden was eliminated by France in the previous round), Despite some crazy chances to score an equaliser in the dying minutes, the score did not evolve. Japan secured a medal while France will have to play one more game for a potential bronze.

On our way back home I had to face my first and only transport dysfunction of the week. The tube was jammed and we had to wait for almost an hour standing in the Olympic way linking the stadium and the station. The colourful and joyful atmosphere helped the time go by. Mexican waves even took form, until the horse mounted police asked us politely to stop in order to keep the animals calm.

A few trains later I was home and asleep, recharging batteries before the following day.