You're reading: Clueless fans inject fun into Olympic contests

LONDON — Lucy Stewart says she likes water polo — even if it doesn't have horses.

Like
many spectators at the London Olympics, Stewart was watching with
perplexed pleasure Monday as Australia beat Greece in the men’s
preliminary play. She had never been to a water polo game before.

“I
did think until a week ago that it was horses. My husband had to
explain that it wasn’t,” she said somewhat sheepishly. “I was completely
clueless.”

Stewart is absolutely not alone at these Olympics.
Fans at all sorts of stadiums are going to sports they’ve never seen.
The British public wanted to see this spectacle, the Olympics — to be
part of the action, no matter the sport.

A complex ticketing
process fueled this desire. London organizers were faced a huge demand
for tickets, since most of this island nation of 63 million can get to
London within a day or so, and the capital itself has 8 million
potential ticket buyers.

Not everyone was going to get into
high-demand sports like athletics, where British favorite Jessica Ennis
took gold in the heptathlon.

In hopes of being equitable,
organizers established a lottery system in which people blindly
registered for tickets and handed over their credit cards before they
knew what — if any — tickets they were getting. Some people put down
thousands of pounds (dollars) in hopes of getting to see Usain Bolt run —
only to find themselves at table tennis or archery.

The sports themselves recognized this conundrum and responded with how-to guides.

Take
water polo. A giant video screen introduces newbies to the sport. One
video sketches basic rules, including the number of players and size of
the pool. Another describes three standard scoring techniques, causing a
more experienced fan to mutter “it’s not called a ‘bounce’ shot, it’s a
‘skip’ shot!”

Local children put together another video,
explaining the sport using rubber ducks in an inflatable pool. One of
the alleged rules — do not splash your opponent — might seem to be
completely ignored as fans watch a churning mass of arms and legs in
water, but never mind. And there appears to be no video that explains a
sport in which much of the action is underwater and unseen.

But fans like Maria Ramos could care less about the rules.

“It’s
fun to come — just to take in the atmosphere,” she said. “It’s a girl’s
dream to see all these Greek Adonis-es in Speedos.”

At beach
volleyball, organizers simply assume their fans know nothing about the
sport but want to be entertained. In a Circus Maximus atmosphere, fans
are directed by a showman, who tells them when to clap and to stand up
for set points. Even brief pauses are filled with dancers starting
conga lines. People party on to the late hours — and a standard joke is
that the fans are keeping Prime Minister David Cameron awake in his
nearby Downing Street home.

At a recent match, the announcer
dubbed Latvia’s Aleksandrs Samoilovs “the Lion King” because of his
distinctive mane of blond hair. The fans jumped on the idea. From then
on, every time Samoilovs stepped back to serve, a group of Australians
began to sing “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps
tonight…”

And just in case they want to identify what they are seeing, a video screen offers helpful clues like “block!” or “SPIKE!”

This ain’t Wimbledon, that’s for sure.

But
fun and games like this are part of the reason that fans are willing to
pay to see anything — anything — just to be part of the London
Olympics. And the response from organizers has been to play on every
stereotype and gag to help spectators along.

At water polo, a
ticket taker was using a little polo pony on a stick —with swim cap and
goggles — to direct fans to their seats. It was not clear how many got
the joke.

But others were prepared. Simon Chow of Essex decided he
was going to bone up on water polo before taking his family to the
match.

“It’s the Olympics,” he said. “You want to try to watch sports you don’t normally.”

His son, Michael, 10, was surprised at how much he liked being in the arena.

“I thought it was going to be rubbish,” he said. “But it was better than I thought.”