ELLE Olympics

This week we found ourselves swept up in Olympic fever: We held our breaths the duration of the opening ceremony, we were glued to our screens when divers Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield took the plunge in the 10m platform dive, screamed until we were blue in the face as Helen Glover and Heather Stanning rowed their way to gold and nearly passed out from excitement with Bradley Wiggins took home gold in the men’s cycling time trial.

In fact we felt so inspired that we thought to stage our very own ELLE Olympics. So what if we couldn’t reach Olympic times or if our setting was Soho Square instead of the Olympic stadium in Stratford? We recorded events…click through if you dare.

So yes, there is every possibility that this event was more Sports Day than Olympics but boy was it fun. A few members of the public stopped to watch, we concluded our sporting abilities were so impressive the general public surely thought they were witnessing a proper Olympic event. Unfortunately more than a few eggs were harmed in this event.

We learnt a couple of valuable lessons in the ‘hula-off’ between Acting Picture Editor Nikki (2) and Beauty Intern Joely (6): one, make sure your hula-hoop is properly assembled. And two, hula-hooping in wedges is a bad idea. Not surprisingly considering the condition of Joely’s hoop here, Nikki took home the medal.

Hurdles, ELLE style. Yes, those are AW12 ELLE Collections and the September issue of ELLE. It might look easy but the real challenge was not to get our precious issues dirty! The feet you spy here belong to ELLEuk.com Beauty Writer Amy who flew over those magazines like a whippet and came in at first place. Impressive.

So, we gather the aim of the long jump is to jump far but Beauty Intern Joely had to win, just look how high she jumped! Forget the rules, it was Joely’s re-enactment of Keanu’s move in The Matrix that won her the gold.

Just look at the sheer joy on the face of Feature’s Assistant Georgia as she beats the rest of the team over the finish line. I could tell you that it was a hundred-metre sprint but that would be a lie – it was precisely a (small) lap of Soho Square in London. Just look at her face, she earned that gold!

Here’s ELLE Designer Lisa skipping her way to victory in what we like to call the ‘Jump Rope’ event (what? The Olympics schedule doesn’t have this?). Well, Lisa sure felt like an Olympic athlete after who-knows-how-many jumps over that rope. A worthy winner!

Here are some of our winners from the day. We don’t have runners up here; it’s gold or nothing! In this case edible gold coins. Yum. We hope we have inspired you to stage your own Olympics, although feel free to do a more professional job of it.