London Tube Olympic Legends Map: Bubka, Klitschko, Swoopes

Kyiv, April 6, 2012. Preparing for the Games of the XXX Olympiad, London underground administration came up with an alternative map for the London tube. Now it features 361 stations renamed after the most famous Olympic athletes in history. Ten Ukrainian big names in Olympic sports made it to the list.

The extraordinary map features lines, dedicated to different kinds of sport – football, pool sport, athletics, cycling, basketball, tennis, rowing, sailing, gymnastics, triathlon, boxing, wrestling, judo, taekwondo, etc. London underground administration had underground stations renamed after world class athletes like Andre Agassi, Kobe Bryant, Roger Federer, Yelena Isinbayeva, Michael Jordan, Rafael Nadal, Sheryl Swoopes, Serena Williams in a “unique interpretation of the Underground map”, states Transport for London.

Ukrainian sportspersons are featured in the athletics (Valeriy Borzov, Serhiy Bubka, Volodymyr Kuts, Yuriy Sedykh), boxing (Volodymyr Klitschko), gymnastics (Viktor Chukarin, Larysa Latyninina, Liudmyla Turyshcheva), sailing (Valentyn Mankin), and wrestling (Oleksandr Medved) lines. These ten Ukrainian Olympics champions won the total of 66 medals (40 out of them gold) over the course of their careers.

“We love sport, we love lists and we love London, so what better challenge than to select 361 of the greatest athletes the world has ever seen and to fit them on to our iconic tube map,” said the creators of the map in a joint statement. BBC sports editor Alex Trickett and sports historian David Brooks are happy with the result: “dozens of nations represented, all 2012 Olympic sports accounted for, and [Muhammad] Ali and [Michael] Phelps, two of the greatest Olympians of all time, guarding the Stratford gateways to the Games.”

You can study the map for yourself at the official Transport for London Web page.

At the same time, Ukraine is getting ready to host European football championship EURO 2012, and its underground got a makeover as well. While the stations weren’t renamed after most notable European footballers, each station was attributed a number as its alternative name. This was done in order to relieve the non-Ukrainian speaking foreigners from the trouble of pronouncing or, even worse, remembering the names of the stations like Chernihivska or Kontraktova ploshcha.

Two stations every foreign guest in Kyiv eventually comes across as they are located in the very heart of the Ukrainian capital are named no other than Khreshchatyk and Maidan Nezalezhnosti. As one of the foreign guests in Ukraine jokingly pointed out, once you could pronounce those without having a seizure you’d stayed in Ukraine for too long.