Unknown - London 2012 How was it for us?

This book would of course have been impossible without the glorious summer of sport that London 2012 became. It was the Games that provided me with the impetus to expand my critical sporting horizon beyond the sphere of football and national identity that has been the main focus of my thinking, writing and activism since 1996.

Many thanks to Becky Gardiner and Philip Olterman at Comment is Free , Luke McGee at Huffington Post , Jamie McKay at Open Democracy, Greg Needham at the Morning Star , Louise Potter at Red Pepper , Andy Newman at Socialist Unity , David Renton at LivesRunning and Conrad Landin at Left Futures for providing me with the space during the Olympics to develop my critique in articles as the events took place. Since London 2012 the new Left Unity website has become another space for me to write about the politics of sport thanks to Kate Hudson for that opportunity as has the Inside Left blog, so thanks to Gareth Edwards too.

BBC local radio was a regular outlet for my views throughout London 2012. Thanks in particular to BBC Sussex, BBC Northampton, BBC Derby, BBC West Midlands, BBC Cumbria, BBC Merseyside, and not forgetting BBC Radio 5.

James Graham organised an excellent roundtable for the journal Soundings to review the Games and was kind enough to invite me to take part. The University of Brighton, where I am a Research Fellow in Sport and Leisure Culture, continues to provide an intellectually stimulating and supportive environment for my writing. Both the Third Year sports journalism students and the Hastings campus sociology lunch group provided invaluable feedback, and occasionally laughed in the right places too. The same goes for sports journalism students at the London College of Communications, University of the Arts London, who were sufficiently interested in what I had to say about London 2012 to convince me there was a collection to edit.

On the night of the Opening Ceremony the company I co-founded with Hugh Tisdale, Philosophy Football, organised an alternative event at East Londons Rich Mix Arts Centre. Again this was a useful stimulus towards the decision to put this collection together. For their varied contributions many thanks to Martyn Routledge, Paul Sinha, David Goldblatt, Alan Tomlinson, Martin Polley, Jude Bloomfield, Bob Gilbert, David Renton, Rod Laver, Mel Gomes, Isy Suttie, Tricity Vogue, Sharon Sukhram and Owen Tudor.

Sally Davison at Lawrence & Wishart didnt take too much persuading to publish the collection. Always a joy and a pleasure to work with, a publisher that appreciates that the point is to change it. Colin Robinson at OR Books persuaded me I was a fit and proper author to write about London 2012 and published my Why The Olympics Arent Good For Us And How They Can Be , to which this book is a kind of sequel.

Assembling a collection of this sort is a bit like managing Team GB. I needed a variety of viewpoints, backgrounds, areas of expertise and styles of writing, and when writers dropped out a pair of impact substitutes as well. Thanks to all the contributors for agreeing to write and being such a nice bunch to edit.

One of my oldest friends Paul Jonson was kind enough to read my essay for the collection. He described it as spiky and contemporary. I blame him entirely if other readers fail to agree.

A key argument of this book is that all sport is socially constructed. So it is only right that I acknowledge the ways in which my own sports have framed my writing. My daily eight mile running route to Mount Caburn and back is rounded off by a Sunday morning sixteen-mile long run via Kingston near Lewes along the South Downs Way to Beddingham Hill before heading home to Lewes through Glynde. Neither route ever fails to inspire my thinking about sport. The swimming pool at Waves Leisure Centre adds an aquatic dimension, the community-owned Lewes FC a spectating perspective, and taking my son Edgar to Little Kickers for his football training provokes thoughts on childrens coaching. Thanks to you all.

None of this would have been possible without the Games themselves of course. I spent four unforgettable days there with my partner Anne and Edgar and filling my head with ideas to turn into a book at no time stopped me from enjoying myself immensely. This was the experience that left me wondering how was it for us.