It’s safe to assume that all of the 2012 Olympic athletes have been anxious to arrive at the Olympic Village and officially get their experience underway, but some of them had to wait a bit longer than others on Monday. As US 400-meter hurdler Karron Clement outlined on his Twitter page, one of the bus drivers that was taking athletes to the Olympic Village on Monday got lost along the way. Unless Clement was exaggerating, it took quite a while for them to get back on track and sounds like there were some pretty restless competitors on board.
Um, so we’ve been lost on the road for 4hrs. Not a good first impression London.
— Kerron Clement (@KerronClement) July 16, 2012
Athletes are sleepy, hungry and need to pee. Could we get to the Olympic Village please.
— Kerron Clement (@KerronClement) July 16, 2012
Believe it or not, the the bus driver that was responsible for Clement and company was not the only one who got lost. According to The Daily Telegraph, 30 officials and medical had to rely on the GPS devices on their iPhones to direct their bus driver when he also got lost. Since the Olympic Village is so new, the iPhone was almost no help.
“One of the doctors on board got (the GPS system) working for him, but then the Olympic Village hadn’t been loaded into the system and everyone was trying to find the name of the street that the village was in,” one official said. “In the end another physio got out his iPhone and gave directors to the bus driver via his phone.”
For what it’s worth, Britain’s sports and Olympics minister Hugh Robertson apologized to those who had transportation problems and said the drivers need to know where they’re going. For the athletes who had to sit on a bus for four extra hours, it’s probably worth about as much as the excuse this pilot would give for flying an athlete to the wrong city.
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