Introducing Wenlock and Mandeville

Love them or hate them, The olympic and paralympic mascots were introduced recently. Slightly odd-looking one eyed creatures - they (like the original logo) have been slammed by most of the papers. But they're growing on me.



Wenlock (the mascot of the olympic games) is named after the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock, which hosted the Wenlock games in the mid 19th century - an inspiration for the modern olympic movement.

Mandeville is named after Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Bucks (incidentally a few miles from my home) where in the 1940s Dr Ludwig Guttman set up a spinal unit. He came up with the Stoke Mandeville games to inspire the disabled soldiers he treated. They became the forerunner to the modern paralympics.

The organising committee have gone to a lot of effort to give these critters a story. you can watch film about their 'birth' in a steel factory in Bolton, here.

Mind you, they're still not as cuddly as our friends from Vancouver 2010