They were on sale, David, so I just brought them on the Olympic site.David wrote:Wow I'm very jealous prettyx. How did you manage to get tickets for these events? Sounds great, hope you can take photos!
Had no idea at the time that they were such good tickets!So we made history with the first game to be played at the Olympic Basketball Arena, it was on the news!
The Olympic Park, however, is still a building site. We waited in the queue for the doors to open at 1.30pm, arriving about 10 minutes before then, but there was a very long queue already. Half an hour after the doors opened, we finally reached the security checks, and I saw a guy making notes. Well, they definitely need to increase the area for the security checks, like at airports to handle the amount of people coming through next year, but I expect this was only makeshift, as it was under a canopy and there were only two points. Once through, we were ushered on to waiting buses to be ferried the 5-7 minutes journey through the building site to the Basketball Arena which was impressive!
Once inside, there were plenty of seats and we grabbed some good ones in the main section, back row in the centre - where else
- just in front of two rows which looked like it was reserved for camera crew, journalists and VIPs. It was a good vantage point to see the whole of the games. Once the bottom tier filled up they opened the top tier. At this point, who should turn up, but Jimmy Carr. He spied two empty seats in the row in front of me, but people were going in and out to b*y lunch etc as the games was not starting until 3.30pm, so they weren't actually free.Here is Jimmy Carr asking "Are those seats taken?"
An usher obviously spots who Jimmy Carr is and takes him to the VIP section.
Jimmy and his friend in the VIP section, they wave as we took photos of him!
Then he takes photos of himself and the place and tweets about it
jimmycarr
At the Olympic Basketball Arena for the warm up event. Looks like London might just pull this off. Love it. http://t.co/mSdN9fw
jimmycarr
It's China V's Australia. Hardly seems fair the Chinese have so many more people to pick the team from. http://t.co/PxCm4OL
I responded
@jimmycarr cheeky! Exciting match though. Nice pic.
Jimmy only stayed for one match. We stayed for all three - Australia v China 71/43, Serbia v Croatia 71/83 and Britain v France 60/82. Some of the players were just under 7 ft tall (210cm). The Serbs and Croatians were the hunkiest! The teams that won are the one's that played the most aggressive as far as I can see.
As people who knows basketball, it is a very fast game since they introduced the new rule where they only have a certain amount of time to score, like 24 seconds, and if they do not do so in that time, the ball passes to the other side. So it is really exciting to watch and we love it when they make "a slam-dunk" to score, that is jump right up over the net and slams the ball in! So there were a lot of audience participation with the count down from 10!
It all ended around 10.30pm. We then had to queue for about five minutes to get the bus back to the entrance of the Olympic Park, and then a short walk back to Stratford Station. A great day out if you can get tickets! Recommended!
