As a wonderful summer Olympics in London drew to its close, the City got back to work last month. For one British gold medallist, though, the glamour was only just beginning.
Little can feted track cyclist Dani King have dreamed, when she won the team pursuit Olympic title alongside Laura Trott and Joanna Roswell, and setting a new world record in the process, what would later come her way.
Last month, she was guest of honour at the Battle of the Quants, a conference for quantitative specialists with a calendar of exciting events including a panel discussion on how to conduct due diligence on quantitative hedge funds and a networking buffet lunch featuring discussions on sourcing data for sentiment analysis models as well as tagging, enabling and coding such sentiment data for use in financial models. One can only wonder if King’s thoughts briefly strayed to the attractions of an early return to Team GB’s famously onerous training regime.
No doubt, UK chancellor George Osborne will be flinching at any thought of returning to the track. Osborne entertained British crowds this summer as much as any Olympic Greco-Roman wrestler, trying to force his opposite number Ed Balls to admit exerting influence on Barclays to lower its Libor submissions.
What was his reward? No glamorous breakfast for him chewing over the gritty issues around capital introduction for quant funds; rather his recompense, when presenting medals at the Paralympics, was a cascade of boos from a capacity crowd.
The joke quickly became: why did 80,000 people in the Olympic stadium boo the chancellor? Because they can’t fit any more in.