Lee Sobot: Caught by surprise as Games kick-started ahead of schedule

In fact they will be two days old this morning won’t they?

No, five actually with Friday’s opening ceremony actually presenting itself with the Olympics already three days old.

Great Britain’s women’s football team will not have been the only ones left confused as the whole opening procedure has also left yours truly a bit baffled.

In case you had not noticed, my unpronounceable surname and strange looking mug has been popping up on the Yorkshire Post pages for the past three weeks now.

A series of tasks have been presented my way by our group sports editor and this week my assignment was to write the back page colour piece – “on any subject you want Lee, doesn’t have to be the Olympics.”

But being a racing man, the Olympics was always a long odds-on favourite to be my weapon of choice and, joking apart, how wonderful it was to finally get the huge extravaganza going.

For a long time, the ‘O’ word has never been far from any piece of copy and were I to have a pound for every time I have typed the word ‘Olympics’ I would be a rich man.

Hopefully, I will be anyway this morning after a Friday night Lottery win.

But, on a serious note, for hundreds of athletes these Games are the culmination of four years’ painstaking hard work to attempt to shine at a Games which for many is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Yes, the Olympics obviously come around every four years but the last time they were on these shores was way back in 1948.

We have had to wait 64 years for them to come around again and it is a fair bet that not many of us will experience such a thing ever again.

So we absolutely should make the most of it and feel no guilt in savouring every second or having Olympic parties or splashing as much copy as possible about the thing all over our newspapers.

Here’s also hoping that the Games can be a massive triumph not just for Great Britain but also for Yorkshire with Jessica Ennis and the Brownlee brothers amongst those set to fly the White Rose flag high.

For Ennis and the Brownlees, the Games are the end of a monumental four-year journey and in interviews with all three their sole focus was on London.

It is not just the Olympics but the Parlympics as well with Leeds swimming star Claire Cashmore revealing in another recent interview how the Queens Hotel where she is currently staying were serving her a daily ‘Olympic menu.’

Even from a journalistic point of view, the Olympics are the end of a major cycle with so many stories building up towards what could possibly happen in the capital.

Now we are finally here, though, seeing numbers like 366 and 483 on the Olympics ‘days to go’ countdown does still seem like yesterday.

Now we are here it is time to fully embrace the Games and it is hoped they are a success also on the organisational front which they probably will be as Seb Coe seems to know what he is doing.

He has reportedly been getting by on four-and-a-half hours sleep in the run-up to the Games so nobody can accuse him of a lack of effort.

But for me, a clanger was dropped before the Games even began as why were events starting on Wednesday, two days before Friday’s official opening ceremony?

You would not have a World Cup opening ceremony 48 hours after a load of group matches would you? Exactly.

So the whole thing is just a bit mystifying with all the countdowns saying ‘two days to go’ on Wednesday technically incorrect.

They began on Wednesday with the women’s football – followed by the men’s the following day.

The latter has been another bone of contention and during this last week I’ve not found one person behind Great Britain’s quest for glory on the football front.

“Shouldn’t be an Olympic sport,” Leeds United’s former defender Brendan Ormsby said to me on Friday and another former Whites player, Eddie Gray, was in full agreement, stating how he was looking forward to seeing Usain Bolt but not Stuart Pearce’s side.

Whatever way you look at it the football has not taken off whatsoever but you can not blame the organisers for trying.

You can, however, certainly blame them for their North Korea/South Korea flag blunder which was both highly embarrassing but also – to us anyway – very funny.

For those who missed this little gem, the North Korea women’s football team walked out underneath a screen showing their names next to a South Korean flag.

The wrong country and they could not have had worse mix up if they tried given that North Korea and South Korea are still, technically, at war and hate each other with a passion.

One work colleague said to me how it would be like Scotland walking out under the England flag but I reckon it would be closer to a Yorkshire team walking out under a Red Rose Lancashire banner.

A right old horlicks of the highest degree and it will not be the last of these Olympics which officially finish on August 12.

At least that is when the closing ceremony is so who knows when they will actually finish – August 15 perhaps?

Okay, okay, that’s enough London Olympics-ribbing and let us now all unite and embrace this marvellous occasion as much as we can.

Let’s have Olympic parties and watch every single second and make the most of it while we can.

and another thing...

ALONG with football, horse racing has always been the sport closest to my heart.

After being introduced to the sport as a nine-year-old by my late granddad and being hooked ever since, I am one of those desperate for the Sport Of Kings to succeed.

But shifting to metric measures and ditching furlongs for metres is not the answer and will only serve to turn off those already attached to the sport.

The metric measures were trialed for the first time at Sandown on Wednesday but it is anticipated that the experiment receives the same not-so-rave reviews as last year’s decimalisation project.

That brainwave was an attempt to make racing more accessible to the younger generation and general public but achieved nothing and only served to annoy.

Messing around with metric measures and metres will only do likewise and furlongs are part of racing’s history that should not be removed.

We might not measure our daily distances in furlongs but it’s not rocket science to get your head around them if you are going to the races, even if it is for the very first time.

Eight of them make a mile so 16 is two miles and, therefore, a five-furlong sprint is just over half a mile.

What more do you need to know?