Five Rings

This week tickets for the 2012 games went on sale, online, and Visa cocked it up, unable to take payments from cards ending August 2011 or in like five months. If that weren't bad enough, the Omega count-down clock in Trafalgar Square quit inside 24-hours. It is all starting to feel a bit like the Millennium Dome and boy oh boy that is another something we don't need. Still I and we have great faith in Seb Coe, the games organiser, and no doubt the glitches will be worked through. Meanwhile, the Olympic-rings greet passengers arriving to London St Pancras from Paris, as I did yesterday following a return voyage and lunch.

Said Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games and designer of the Olympic rings in the 1912 Revue Olympique:

"The emblem chosen to illustrate and represent the world Congress of 1914...: five intertwined rings in different colors - blue, yellow, black, green, and red - are placed on the white field of the paper. These five rings represent the five parts of the world which now are won over to Olympism and willing to accept healthy competition.."