Watching the newly elected Mayor of London  Boris Johnson, at the Olympics was amusing. It was obvious that no-one told him what to do, when to do it or how to do it. The optimist in me thinks this was just a normal guy thrust into extraordinary circumstances who was as befuddled as I would have been in front of 90+ thousand people and 1 billion people on TV. The cynic in me wants to observe that for a country that spent so much time choreographing everything, you would think they would take the time to walk the Mayor of London through the ceremony, you would think they would tell him to button up his suit, you would think they gave him a comb… But they didn’t. Was it all done to make the Mayor of London, and the City of London look ridiculous as compared to Beijing?

But I am an optimist so I’ll assume he was just thrust into extraordinary circumstances without his own handlers giving him sound advice.

So here’s what it looked like.

He arrived on stage looking haggard and bedraggled. His hair was poorly done. His suit looked ill-fitting. Couldn’t a tailor in London have given him a proper suit?

He walks onto a stage with over 1 billion people watching, with his suit open looking confused about what he should be doing.

He then stands on stage, and his first reaction is to put his hands in his pockets … only to see that everyone else has their hands by their side … so he pulls them out.

He than stands wondering what is going to happen next.

Then we watch the Mayor of Beijing majestically wave the flag and pass it on with two hands to the president of the IOC, who then in turn passes it to the Mayor of London, who has never waved a flag in his life. The flag is twisted around the flag-pole so we have this anxious moment where we wonder if The Mayor of London is going to drop the flag but thankfully we avoid that embarrassment. Finally the Mayor of London hands the flag over with one-hand relieved to be done with this ceremony…

For a country that understood pomp and style seeing the Mayor of London be so confused with such a simple ceremony was just plain funny.