The Commonwealth Games were fantastic. Splendidly organised, welcoming and it's a great way to see a city. It gives you a reason to explore, to see things you wouldn't otherwise, a reason to be there.
And I love seeing sports I know nothing about, you spend the first little while working out the scoring system, then settling on someone to cheer for and then noticing the human drama.
(This made the weightlifting brilliant - there's so much emotion and preparation compressed into each lift, each moment is massive. The tiny figures in the distance still communicate a ton of effort and expression. Well done Zoe!)
I was rather struck with Laura Massaro's squash racquet. I think it's a Head Xenon 135 and it looked like the grip was in a rather vibrant fluro yellow/green. I've not photographed it well.
It reminded me of a trip to the Nike archives I made, several years ago. They showed us a bunch of very early Nikes they'd just bought off a Japanese collector. Many of them very bright, almost neon, even after 30 years or so. The designers I was with were fascinated by them, asking about the inks/dyes/whateverthey'recalled, the archivist dashed their hopes - there would be no way we could use these any more, they'd breach all sorts of environmental regulations, probably made out of quite nasty stuff.
Presumably the recent rash of fluoro all over the high street and the football pitch means there have been some breakthroughs in less noxious inks. Somewhere at a chemicals business a Head of Hue is getting a well deserved bonus.
I spent quite a lot of time at the bowls wondering if you could cheat.
Could you infiltrate some sort of sphero technology into your wood, making it steerable after its release? Do they x-ray the woods? That would put paid to that.
And, presumably, you wouldn't need it to be that controlable. You could get quite a lot of advantage with just the ability to move some weight inside the wood at the right moment, shift its centre of gravity slightly. Would you need a compatriot in the crowd with a control? Could a human even make it work and make it seem natural? Would you, in fact, need a system that could see the jack and the other bowls, could monitor the speed and direction of the wood being bowled and then apply a subtle shift to its centre of gravity to put it somewhere more useful without anyone noticing? Is that even possible? How many cameras would you need? Could you do it with a bunch of networked phones?
Badminton - same question.