Nobody could say Andy Turner wasn’t ready and willing.

After years of being a nearly man, and two years of being a shunned man, at least as far as Lottery funding was concerned, Britain’s high hurdler was determined to relish his new status as a European champion - and all the publicity that went with it.

Which was why he found himself on an open top bus on Thursday crawling through central London’s mid-afternoon traffic with a BBC TV crew in attendance - and a host of media representatives becoming increasingly agitated about the time it was taking for the transport to take them from the lofty headquarters of the Aviva insurance company, sponsors of the London Grand Prix for which these publicity wheels were in motion, and the hotel from which the bus had set out oh so many hours earlier in the morning. So they could get on with their work. For deadlines.

You couldn’t blame the bus.

Well, you could blame the bus.

In that it was the kind of bus you see in black and white Ealing comedies, with a chirpy Cockney sparrer of a conductor on board shouting "Room for a little ‘un inside!" before ringing the bell - ding ding - and winding another ticket out of the little machine slung round his neck.

Which meant that it was small and cramped. No doubt by the standards of 1952, when this particular London Transport model had been constructed, it represented state-of-the-art comfort for the capital dwellers who hopped on and off it on all those distant, smoggy mornings and evenings.

Perhaps people were smaller in 1952. Maybe a population still enduring rationing simply took up less space. I’ve noticed that about cars, too. When I was the eldest of three children, in a family of five, we used to manage to get up and down the M1 in a cream and red Wolseley 1500. I saw a Wolseley 1500 the other day. It looked like a toy.

But I digress.

So here was Mr Turner, looking as casual as anyone could be who had been asked to be interviewed on the top of a bus by BBC TV. And as we rattled through the City in a northerly - northerly? Weren’t we supposed to be heading back down to the hotel in Croydon? - the interviewer and camera lady concentrated their attentions on the hurdler, asking him a question that was drowned out by the sound of a jackhammer from a passing high rise construction project.

The sound was very loud, and it went on for a long time.

After everybody felt it had gone away, the interview resumed.

To be interrupted by the continuous clamour of an alarm.

And...we were back. 

"Just to elaborate Andy, how do you build on that European performance going forwards?"

As Andy put his mind to the request - at least he hadn’t been asked how he could build on it going sideways, which would have been a much trickier question - might even have required planning permission - the bus remained static in one of those mysterious accumulations of traffic that can occur in the capital at any time.

Years later, sorry, only half an hour or so later, we had passed the Blind Beggar pub, where I recalled there had been some shooting incident back in the 60s over the choice of record on a Juke Box - what’s so bad about The Sun Ain’t Going To Shine Any More anyway, I’d like to know?

And we had passed a Porsche dealership, where the hyperactive David Oliver - didn’t I mention that the world’s fastest high hurdler was also on the bus to discuss his imminent race? - seemed to have gone at least part of the way to arranging delivery of a shiny new model to his home with a bloke standing in the forecourt before the driver disobligingly set the ancient motor into juddering progress once again.



Oliver was clad in the tracksuit top of the team he has supported vehemently on television, Arsenal. And he was talking animatedly about how much he was looking forward to seeing them in real life when he went up to see them play Liverpool at Anfield the day after his race.

Off this bus by Sunday. You had to love the man’s optimism.

It became clear that the unexpected northerly diversion was in fact the main point of the exercise for what the nearest thing to the bus conductor called "the client." The Olympic Park was to provide the imposing backdrop to their Oliver interview.

But without agreed access to the site, finding that backdrop proved to be a long and increasingly unpopular process.

At one point we slowed with the stadium in view, only to have that view blocked by a very large McDonalds restaurant.

After circling the Olympic park at least once, the bus juddered to a decisive halt.

A tiny sliver of the Olympic stadium was visible between warehouses with Rose Bay Willow herb growing out of them. To the right, out of sight when the transmission went out but very much in sight at the time, was a billboard featuring the swarthy face of Eric Cantona and the slogan: "The unmissable should be just that".

As the French Big Brother stared frankly down, the bouncy Oliver - Tigger in human form - was persuaded to angle his large frame into the frankly inadequate space of a top deck seat so that questions could be put to him of an Olympic persuasion.

The questions continued.

Oliver stayed as still as he could and answered them.

After a while, one of the young ladies working for the sponsors very kindly visited a nearby Shell garage and came back bearing bottles of water.

We were parked by Autumn Street. Hadn’t it been Spring Street when we had first arrived?

In retrospect, the journey didn’t take a long time - when compared, say, to the average lifetime. An hour and a half later, after a leisurely, juddery progress from the north to the south of the capital, we had almost arrived! A PR triumph.

Tyson Gay, who had taken the original bus ride up from Croydon to the press conference which had been organised at HQ Aviva, was apparently not a happy bunny when he arrived - and had elected for swifter, quieter transport for the return journey.

As it turned out, we were close to arriving with only one competitor on the bus.

Our departure from the Olympic Park offered  another fleeting glimpse of stadium which caused Oliver, who is not a small man, to rise from his seat in order to take a picture on his mobile phone.

A low bridge loomed in front of our open top bus.

Had the world’s third fastest high hurdler not sat down immediately after deeming his snap satisfactory, there might have been a different story to tell about this magical mystery tour.

In which case, of course, none of this would have been written.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames