Fencing champions

After a day of work, I had some Olympic fencing to look forward to. The journey was a little frustrating since we tried to travel from Greenwich to Excel via the Emirates Air Line. It was two hours until the fencing started so I thought that would be plenty of time, despite the large queue. After all, the cable car takes around 10 minutes to reach Victoria Dock, just outside the venue. However, we were almost boarding when the whole system stopped and the staff began to clean the cars. The crowd speculated as to what had caused this manic cleaning - a person being sick? Three-quarters of an hour later, and with the staff still cleaning and the phrase "We will be boarding shortly" ringing in our ears every so often, tempers began to fray. Fred and I cut our losses and headed for the Tube - we got to the venue late and the cable car did start to run shortly after we left, but hey ho. Speaking to the staff later (we caught the cable car back and it's fabulous), we received a refund and discovered that there'd been a technical hitch, but the staff didn't know what was going on at the time. I have to hand it to them - they dealt with the situation extremely professionally and calmly, especially since they must have been as frustrated as we were at not knowing what the hold up was.

Back to the Olympics and we watched the Bronze and Gold matches of the women's team fencing. (I stupidly wondered when the Silver match was being played - it took a while for the penny to drop. Duh.) The bronze match was between the US and Russia and the US won it by a sudden death point - a bit like a penalty shoot-out. The match was a draw so the first person to touch her opponent with the epee would win the bronze. In seconds it was over. I really felt for the Russians.

The gold match was between Korea and China and was a really fierce series of battles. China won the gold and Korea the silver.