The Seoul Olympics...

I'm going to show my age here and talk about the Seoul Olympics. I was in my first year of Senior School (Middle School in most of the world?) in 1988 in Sale in Australia.

We were assigned an Olympics-related project at school (and I suppose a lot of other people my age were as well). The project must have been for geography because we were required to get some Olympics newspaper cuttings, find out which countries were mentioned and mark them on a map. It must have been a project set over the Spring holidays because I remember that we were in Fiji when the Olympics were actually on and didn't see any of it at all. We had to get our neighbours to save all their newspapers so that I could actually do the project.

Anyhow, I was able to get a clipping which mentioned each participating country. My teacher was astounded as although she hadn't given any guidelines, she assumed people would stop around 20-25 countries. I think this project was the first time I realised just how many countries there are in the world (of course there are a hell of a lot more now.) Anyhow, wondering around the Olympic Park in Seoul suddenly made me think of that project.

Somewhere in Mum's attic there is a bunch of newspaper clippings listing countries to match to each of these flags...A special prize to anyone who can name the countries these flags represent... Of course while I was doing an outstanding job on my Olympic project, someone else was doing a splendid job of screwing up his experience of the Olympics. He was caught pretty much immediately so his name was presumably never recorded on the wall of Champions but I wonder if someone in Sydney has had to go and chip Marion Jones' name off the equivalent monument in Sydney.Alex will be around 10 when the Olympics hit London in 2012, I wonder if he will have a similar project.