Helsinki Visitors Beware
Posted: Sat Jul 30, 2005 1:17 pm
My first visit to Helsinki Olympic Stadium (in 1972) brings back two special memories; one good, one bad. Make that one good and two bad: The tape I borrowed to measure my run-up for that masters meet turned out to have been broken and re-attached with two feet missing.
The good and the really bad had to do with discovery that there was a cozy, dark bar/cocktail lounge under the stadium! How can North America still be so far behind, with just beer served in our stadia a quarter century later?
The good was just discovering the bar. It might even have been good that all the walls of the bar were covered with full-size, back-lit transparencies of athletes in action. What definitely was bad was that each and every action-photo showed a vaulter plummeting to earth after his pole had just broken.
Just to warn you that the sadistic creature who designed that macabre display might still be at large.
The good and the really bad had to do with discovery that there was a cozy, dark bar/cocktail lounge under the stadium! How can North America still be so far behind, with just beer served in our stadia a quarter century later?
The good was just discovering the bar. It might even have been good that all the walls of the bar were covered with full-size, back-lit transparencies of athletes in action. What definitely was bad was that each and every action-photo showed a vaulter plummeting to earth after his pole had just broken.
Just to warn you that the sadistic creature who designed that macabre display might still be at large.