What we really think about the London Olympic Games

Armed with a Polaroid camera, photographer Oleg Tolstoy asked Londoners to pose for a picture and write down their thoughts on the Olympics. The result? Some like it, some don’t
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Joshi Herrmann28 May 2012

It is now less than two months before the Games takes over our city, but what do Londoners really think about it?

We know more than ever what being the Olympic city will mean — missiles on east London roofs, working from home, a forgotten corner of town finally blossoming. In offices, pubs and crowded Tube trains, Londoners are talking about the Olympics like they haven’t before — predicting disaster, boasting about tickets, discussing sports they didn’t know existed.

In a national poll last month, 51 per cent of people said the Games wouldn’t be worth the £9.3 billion cost to the taxpayer. The young disagree with the old, it found, with 58 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 saying that the event will be worth the money. Meanwhile, another survey found that wealthier people are twice as likely to be excited about the Games.

Questions about long-term legacy are more divisive still. When the show goes home and London returns to normal, will the Games have left us like they left the Spanish — “Barcelona-on-Thames” as Ken Livingstone once described the legacy project — or more like the Greeks?

Photographer Oleg Tolstoy, 25, decided to create a pictorial survey of his own by asking Londoners near the Olympic sites what they really thought of London 2012. He stopped up to 400 people on the street, took a Polaroid photograph and asked them to write down the thought or word than came into their head when they thought about the Olympics. Some wrote about economics, other scribbled something about housing, or sport, or the threat of terrorism.

“What was interesting was that people’s views weren’t defined by their background or their job,” says Tolstoy. “It was impossible to predict their take.”

He chose people at random in Hoxton Square, Brick Lane, Spitalfields Market and Liverpool Street. “Only about five people had tickets, and all of them were bankers,” says Tolstoy.

Perhaps predictably, therefore, “a lot of answers didn’t relate to the sport at all, but were commenting on the event”.

“Those who were negative framed it in terms of being hard-done by — people who will have to spend an extra two hours on the trains, for example,” says Tolstoy.

“If people were pro, they were very pro and thought it was great for the country.”

Olympic Opinion, Bermondsey Project Space, 46 Willow Walk, SE1. July 25-Aug 10 daily, 12-6pm. Outsidethe WhiteCube.com

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