Start of the week: A poor performance.
Byline: Bob CypherIT'S been a real Munich mix-up at the European Championships and as far as I am concerned, ``Vorsprung Durch Teknik'' is dead.
The wheels have come off the German efficiency myth.
Or at least that's my impression after a week in this city. It will come as a major shock to the Germans that as far as efficiency is concerned, their championships are a pale shadow of the indoor championships organised in February by their neighbours in Vienna. Although the crowds and performances have been spectacular, the organisation has been abysmal.
My journey to Bavaria started well with a friendly Cardiff cabbie and ended with a surly German coach driver who appeared to prefer an early night or a trip to the bierkeller rather than take me the 30-odd kilometres from the airport to my hotel.
He pulled up outside the central station, took my luggage out and plonked it on the pavement and when I asked in my halting German which direction I should take, he waved vaguely in the direction of Italy and sped off. Danke fur zilch, mein herr.
Perhaps it was retribution for my laughter earlier when I boarded the Lufthansa 737 at Heathrow to find the two flight attendants (they don't seem to call them air stewardesses anymore) were named A Jung, who definitely was NOT young, and D Bintz. Well, I thought, it's a good job she's German 'cos if she had been British, I'm sure she would have been arranging a name change as soon as she could walk.
Fraulein Bintz brought me my meal which was (cue dodgy German accent) verrrrry interesting. It consisted of a meaty thing and was accompanied by something similar to a flapjack but which had a smell similar to that which wafts over Cardiff city centre when Brains are producing a new mash. It was apparently a salt-laden rye bread. The jury's still out on that one.
After finally arriving at my hotel, I found my room to be adequate although I was amazed there were no coffee-making facilities in my room which seems to be standard in every British hotel and most establishments abroad. Anyway, like I said, the organisers of these championships have either gone well over the top with their fastidious arrangements or they have just completely missed the point. The Germans must be the only nation who would have three media centres and hide two of them under the thickest undergrowth seen outside of the Brazilian rain forest.
They have signs, of course. But they are about half the size of this newspaper with print around the same size as these words. Which means you have to almost trip over the darn things before you can read them. After an hour of aimless walking over what seemed to be the same ground, endless ``Entshuledgungs'' (German for ``Excuse me'') and a hundred ``Bittes'' I was ready for some bitter of a different sort. A pint of Brains would have gone down well.) I finally found the accreditation centre, and then looked around a bit more. This media centre is a 10-minute walk from the stadium.
I have covered major events in Malaysia, Australia, Spain, Canada, Portugal, France and Austria and have never seen a media working centre that isn't in the stadium. Now it might be that, 30 years on from those terrible events when the city hosted the Olympics, and since September 11, that the Munich constabulary are a wee bit edgy. But the championships' security was at times Pythonesque with Jobsworths in abundance.
The organisers should have taken some tips from the Austrians who produced an albeit smaller-scale event so brilliantly.
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| Title Annotation: | Comment |
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| Publication: | South Wales Echo (Cardiff, Wales) |
| Date: | Aug 12, 2002 |
| Words: | 612 |
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