Apparently, come Friday, a tiny sporting tournament will take over East London. There will be running. There will be jumping. There will be shooting. And some games will also take place.
Clearly, in a bid to raise awareness of this international tournament you're probably unfamiliar with, a Czech artist has taken an iconic symbol of London - a ruddy great red double-decker bus - and turned it into an ‘athlete'.
The artist, David Cerny - himself no stranger to controversy - noted that push-ups were the "one common exercise for every sportsman in the world". Thus, he bought a 1957 Bristol Lodekka bus from the Netherlands and went about attaching two giant arms onto the side - themselves manipulated by an electrical engine, ‘a lot of wiring' and some suspension tools, allowing the bus to perform push-ups.
In fact, his attention to detail is such that the bus - named ‘London Boosted' - projects a recording of a groaning-voice. Dystopian, much? Cerny has positioned the bus outside the Czech Olympic house in Islington, should you wish to see London as imagined by George Orwell.
"It is training for sport activities but at the same time," says Dave, "it is also punishment in armies and prisons. So the push-ups are a very universal physical activity. It is in a way very ironic."
Erm, quite. Have a gander at the video below. Not to be too grouchy about the lockdown of London for six weeks in the summer, but we may as well equip all our London buses with mechanical arms as with the impending traffic, that's all they'll be able to do...
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