Home What’s New About Storytellers Meet the Storytellers Get Involved Story Archive  
 
 
BT Storytellers Launch Day – 19th July 2011
 

 

Alistair Coleman

Photographer

 

 

 

 

Like this article?

Add your vote to this article using Facebook, Twitter and Google. The more each Storyteller gets, the higher they will rank and the more rewards they get – so spread the word!

 

 

 

  Tweet  

 

 

 

 

So, you’re part of an extraordinarily privileged group of people allowed inside the Olympic Stadium as part of a tour in the company of double Olympic gold winner Daley Thompson. What do you do?

 

If your answer is "have a race", then give yourself a pat on the back and take the rest of the day off. For that is exactly what happened, a full thirteen months before Team GB tears up the track in the hope of Olympic glory.

 

Usain Bolt: Eat our dust!

 

For this is the opening day of the Storytellers project, and BT has brought together a group of us at St Pancras station in London to meet Lord Coe (all apologies after his late arrival, but turning up in style on the back of a motorbike); and the welcoming Daley Thompson, who earned extra points by introducing himself as "Hi, I’m Daley Thompson" to each and every one of us. Star.

 

For geeks of a certain age, Daley was not just the Olympic superstar, but also the face of "Daley Thompson’s Decathlon", the keyboard-thumping, joystick-trashing 1984 computer game. I am a geek of that certain age, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell him the he owed me a computer joystick, utterly killed to death in the mid-eighties, in my own failed quest for Olympic gold.

 

Star-spotting aside, what the Launch Day really did was to build up a team of talented writers, photographers and artists and prod us all in the right direction, and hopefully bring us together as friends. And for the fifteen of us lucky enough to see the Olympic Park, we certainly feel we’re in on the ground floor of something inspiring.

 

It has certainly made me want to sit down, get writing, and crack open Photoshop. And that’s what I’ve done. You can see some photos from the launch day below.

 

 

 
 
 
 
 

BT Group plc, BT Centre, 81 Newgate Street,
London EC1A 7AJ

Contact BT »

Website Terms & Conditions »