Andy & Lynne Harris – Games Makers

People

Andy and Lynne Harris are a husband and wife team from Wendover who both worked as Gamesmakers at the London Olympics.

Lynne was part of the Security Team working at the main Olympic Park. She really enjoyed the opportunity of working with people of all different ages and nationalities whose sole aim was to make the Games as enjoyable and pain-free an experience as possible for the general public.

It was a real pleasure to go to ‘work’ each day knowing that it would be a long hard day, but truly fun and exciting as well. It was wonderful to play just a very small part in what turned out to be an amazingly successful Games. Working with the military was also extremely humbling – considering many of them had lost much of their leave, they were extremely professional and got on with the job without grumbling. It was certainly an eye-opener to hear first hand of some of their experiences out in Afghanistan.

Andy worked with the ‘flags’ team. He helped with flag fitting, handed out flags to teams at the opening ceremony and then provided flags for medal ceremonies at Earls Court and the Excel. He was amazed at the planning – the full-time team had spent two years getting every flag and anthem agreed by each of the 204 nations.

Andy really enjoyed the whole event; it wasn’t perfect but everyone was so positive that stress levels were low. The down side was being backstage and seeing how devastated some athletes were when they had failed to get the medal they wanted – and having to smile and chat to cheerful strangers on the 6.54am train when normally he would sink into anonymity behind the newspaper!

Some back stage ‘insights’: you may have thought that the flame at the opening ceremony arrived by boat and was handed to Steve Redgrave who ran straight into the stadium…No, recorded two hours before!

And attention to detail; what about getting 350 Gamesmakers in the stadium, two days before it opened, to enter every toilet and then flush them all at exactly the same time to make sure the water pressure held up!