The Olympics are over and the paralympics are drawing to a close. They’ve been a gloriously British spectacle from eccentric opening ceremonies and patriotic glory to them only wheeling the ruddy Pet Shop Boys out, it has united a nation in sporting glory, and arguably Yorkshire was leading the charge. Leanne Buchan finds out how the Olympics inspired three lads from Bradford.
If you were anywhere near social media during the Olympics and had any remote connection to the fair county of Yorkshire, you will have seen the Yorkshire medal table. You may have been one of those who watched their county rising through the ranks with more interest than they paid to GB’s progress. It was a strange phenomenon that captured the creative minds of brothers Tim and Matt Fullen and their pal James Sanderson, co-creators of Yorkshire Games.
Everyone was feeling the Yorkshire pride, what inspired you to do something about it?
James: As with most great ideas it started down the pub. Everyone was talking about it and how we beating off countries and closing in on the Aussies. Tim had the idea of putting the medal table on t-shirts which we all agreed would be brilliant. We went our separate ways, slept on it and it still felt like a good idea the next day so we thought why not. It was just an opportunistic way to show our support to our home team.
Tim: As a Yorkshireman born ‘n bred, I have always felt a kind of regional pride, a kind of sense that somehow I was better than my neighbouring Cumbrians, Lancastrians, and those further abroad such as the Oxfordians. The pub, obviously made this feeling stronger, and I just wanted to actually do something to show that pride rather than just talk about it.
Some of my best work is produced in the pub but it’s hard to get a drunken idea up and running. How did you get started?
James: Tim rang me up and asked if I could work up some designs and what started out as a simple replication of the model table led to us exploring other creative ideas that played on the Yorkshire sense of humour. People looked at the medal table and tried to work out what it was about this region that created so many great athletes. We felt it was to do with personality and state of mind, as much about their approach and work-ethic as their stamina and physical ability. The designs reflect that with a tongue-in-cheek approach. Spreadshirt is a well-known hosting platform which I’ve used before and we needed to turn the idea around quickly to not miss the boat so we went with what we knew.
Was it worth taking the chance?
James: Definitely. It was just something that we did on the off-chance and was a bit of fun. Tim’s brother Matt is an ace promoter and runs the club night Shrug, in Bradford. He helped us to spread the word with a Facebook page and we started tweeting about it just to raise awareness. We got a great ground swell of support for the idea with Welcome to Yorkshire and even gold-medal-winning Nicola Adams retweeting us. It just kind of snowballed and we had thousands of visitors to the site appearing in more than 50,000 twitter timelines.
Tim: The beautiful smile of Nicola Adams say it all, you can’t beat a bit of Yorkshire pride! I also feel a great sense of pride that Cameron, and his Chipping Norton cheese fondling friends, could just about muster up a couple of medals in horse dancing, yet our down-to-earth, normal, hard-working, and largely working-class Olympians shot up the medal table to 12th (sandwiched nicely between Kazhakstan and Japan) in proper sports. But that’s a bit controversial isn’t it…
So what next for Yorkshire Gold?
James: The overwhelming support for the project got us thinking about what else we could do to raise the profile of sport in Yorkshire. There’s some great events and clubs here and as a county we’re not known for shouting about our success. Now that the Yorkshire Games brand exists we can use it to develop more ideas for celebrating our sporting success, especially if we are successful in the bid for the Tour de France!
So know you know, random drunk chat down the pub can lead to greatness, check out the merchandise over at Yorkshire Games, look out for my favourite the ‘Chuffed’ baby grow.
Great work! This is the kind of info that are supposed to be shared around the net.