10th October 1964:Tokyo
I hadn't yet been born but I was present on the planet embryonically so arguably this was my first Summer Olympics. I know my parents enjoyed it because they bought the music used for the BBC Olympics presentation - Tokyo Melody by Helmut Zacharias - and helped propel it to number 9 in the singles chart. As one of a limited number of 7-inches in our record box while I was growing up it got a lot of plays, and I still subliminally love it.
12th October 1968:Mexico City
I remember nothing of this but I probably saw some on the TV. The Opening Ceremony started at ten to six so I had every chance of seeing it before I went to bed, but would never have been allowed to stay up afterwards to watch Dixon of Dock Green and Val Doonican.
26th August 1972:Munich
This started in the summer holidays between infant school and junior school - golden years - and unless we'd gone away for the bank holiday weekend I'm sure we'd have been watching the start on telly. The Opening Ceremony slotted into Saturday's Grandstand between racing from Goodwood and cricket from Lord's.
17th July 1976:Montreal
This is the first time I was in the right country on the day of the opening ceremony, because amazingly my family had flown to Canada three days earlier to stay with my Mum's ex-schoolmate/penpal. Perversely this was the day we set off on a week-long circuit of Lake Ontario in a motorhome, so as the Games began we were crossing the St Lawrence into the USA and never saw any of what was going on 150 miles downriver. While the world continued to watch the athletics I was climbing mountains in Vermont, nipping into the ice rink where the 1932 Winter Olympics figure skating had taken place, standing behind the torrent of Niagara Falls and collecting Olympic gamecards from participating McDonald's restaurants. Our family still owns a souvenir glass tumbler with the Games logo on it, which somehow my brother and I have never smashed over the intervening 48 years.
19th July 1980:Moscow
We missed the opening ceremony because we'd gone for a drive in the Chilterns, indeed we were possibly underground in West Wycombe Caves when the flag was raised. But we watched quite a lot of the rest of the coverage because it was one way of occupying Pascal, my French Exchange partner, and stopped him trying to empty the contents of my bedroom drawers onto the floor.
28th July 1984:Los Angeles
Time zones made this harder to watch, but it was the university holidays and I had no obligations so stayed up until four in the morning to watch the opening ceremony on my black and white portable TV. I enjoyed the rocketmen, the airships and the fluffed oath, but was less impressed when my Mum plonked a cup of tea beside my bed four hours later. Total sports-TV overkill ensued, not helped by test cricket filling the daytime hours. The best thing about the first week turned out to be ITV's late night alternative, the reptilian sci-fi drama V, and Diana's jaw haunts me to this day.
17th September 1988:Seoul
I'd started work so it was no longer the holidays, also this Olympics took place mostly while Britain was asleep so proved much easier to miss. I did watch the repeated opening ceremony over breakfast, aided by usually-screamy toddler Charlotte being out with her parents at the annual Eton College Jumble Sale, but switched off as soon as the proper sport started.
25th July 1992:Barcelona
I've blogged about 25th July 1992 in considerable detail before because coincidentally it was my 10,000th day on Earth. As you'll remember I'd taken the train to Luton to take part in Steve's amateur pop quiz and we watched the opening ceremony while we waited for the other contestants to arrive. It was a ridiculously atypical day, and I was having far too much fun to be particularly bothered with how the rest of the Games played out.
19th July 1996:Atlanta
Opening ceremonies now lasted four hours, but because this one happened overnight I watched the BBC's morning repeat and thankfully they'd cut it down to two. Then I took the train to Luton again, and let's just say it wasn't as eventful as last time. My diary describes the subsequent Olympic coverage as "lots of obscure sports in five minute segments just because there's a Brit involved".
15th September 2000:Sydney
My diary has nothing to say about the Australian opening ceremony because it took place while I was at work, and because I was much more interested in who'd win the first series of Big Brother that evening, which turned out to be Craig.
13th August 2004:Athens
I was now living in London, an Olympic Candidate City, but had spent the day at Ashridge on a work jolly our boss had somehow wangled out of the departmental budget. I spent Friday evening watching on the TV and texting BestMateFromWork who was out on the town with a date who turned out to be a jerk. As I blogged at the time, "I'd forgotten how mind-bogglingly tedious an Olympic Opening Ceremony is. It's basically a one hour art&history lesson followed by a two hour geography lesson."
8th August 2008:Beijing
Ah yes, the Games that started at 8.08 on 8.8.08 for Chinese reasons. I remember watching the opening ceremony on the TV in the canteen at work, being dazzled by the massed drumming out of the corner of my eye while a colleague droned on about his intention to sue for underpaid gym membership. I caught up on the 'printing presses' and 'Sarah Brightman' sequences later.
27th July 2012:London
A localevent which I attended on multiple occasions.
5th August 2016:Rio de Janeiro
Technically the opening ceremony started at midnight the following day UK time, so I decided to stay up and watch the low key presentation, the parkour, the giant microbes and the parade (as far as Great Britain) before turning in. After a decent amount of sleep I skedaddled to the seaside and quite frankly that was a lot more entertaining.
23rd July 2021:Tokyo
The first repeat on my list with the Games back in the Japanese capital. The pandemic meant there'd been a five year gap since last time, and the events themselves were seriously muted by an absence of cheering crowds. My favourite bits of the opening ceremony were the clever pictograms, but I was also secretly pleased nothing had topped the first 20 minutes of London's Industrial Revolution mega-tableau. Maybe never will.
26th July 2024:Paris
And so the Games have come round again, in this case after the shortest ever gap (2 years, 11 months and 18 days). I hope they'll be excellent and I hope the innovative Seine-based opening ceremony is a blast. It unnerves me slightly that this is still only the 15th Summer Olympics of my lifetime and I'm unlikely to see more than 20, so I intend to make the most of it and raise a glass to excellence from the comfort of my sofa. Vive les jeux olympiques, and here's to many more.
Summer Olympics of my lifetime
