Sunday 12 August 2012

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Modern Pentathlon


Sixteen days ago I quite happily sneered at the Olympics; they were too expensive for a economically-knackered country, the money would be better spent on infrastructure or a much-needed cash injection into the NHS, they’d been overtaken by the corporate sponsors and had become nothing but a shill for Coca-Cola and worse, a shill paid for by the British taxpayer. Worse, I’ve been unable to take my usual weekly ride out past Stratford as the entire Lee Valley has been cordoned off from the likes of me and my battered Dawes. Last time I was able to go past, the first thing I saw of the Olympic Park was the rear end of The World’s Largest McDonalds.

So how is it that this afternoon, as I write this, I have one eye on a woman riding a horse – admittedly a fine-looking horse – around a course in Horse Guards Parade? And how is it that I have no idea what I’m going to do tomorrow when the Games are all over?

The Opening Ceremony had a lot to do with this: I was still in full-on sneer mode when I say down with a couple of friends and a couple of beers to watch it. I’m not afraid to say that the promise of beer was the deciding factor in joining them that evening. But within half an hour I was done. Drawn in. Suckerpunched. Sitting there with a Stella in my hand, a Chinese take-away on my lap and a stupid great grin all over my stupid great face.

Every day for the last fortnight (and a bit) I’ve sat down and watched whatever was on, switching channels to see what obscure feats were on the Red Button. Every morning I trotted out and bought a newspaper, then came back and read every word of the twenty pages of dedicated Games coverage within, plus the seven or eight pages in the main paper. I’ve never done that, not even in the height of the football season.

And here we are, with that football season less that a week away; usually this would see me poring over the fixture list, making judgments about how each team would perform against another. Today, it leaves me cold. The modern Premier League makes the worst excesses of Barclays’ bonuses look like the petty theft of a sherbet dib-dab from a sweet shop. Let them get on with it, their ridiculous play-acting and their non-stop indiscriminate shagging and their petulant demand for ever more absurd amounts of money. Sod them.

Instead, I want to see more of what I’ve seen over the last fortnight: athletes at the peak of their abilities pushing themselves to the limit and beyond for nothing else but the joy of doing it (yes, and for a potential medal, and for the potential millions in sponsorship and endorsements they could make, but for now you can just shut up, alright?).

I want to see the small sports, the sports that are played in draughty school halls, the sports that are only now coming out into the light as the Lottery money hits; I want to see the weird sports like the keirin with its bowler-hatted pacer who looks like Mr Benn on a day off from being a cartoon. I want to see astonishing things like the gymastic rings, where men built by geometry hold themselves horizontal, several feet off the floor, or like the bars, where tiny flimsy girls throw themselves into the air and bounce off the equipment, their bodies bending and twisting as though they came straight from the pen of Tex Avery. I want to see myself being amazed by things I thought comical; gasping at synchronised swimming, at the levels of athletic ability and physical control needed for that sport and to do it suspended, upside-down, underwater. I want to see thousands of people cheering until their throats bleed as people with origins from all over this world push themselves harder and harder and prove that to be British, and a hero, today doesn’t mean you have to be white, middle-class, moneyed.

I want to feel the inclusivity, the joy, the love that I’ve seen this last sixteen days.

I want to see more of human beings being the best that human beings can be.

And more: these Games have shown again that the BBC, for all the bullying it takes from those in the pocket of those they take to the stadium as guests, does this sort of thing, this kind of event, the kind that pulls the nation together, far better than any commercial concern can. Can you imagine ITV cutting to a commercial the second Jessica Ennis crossed the line? Ant and Dec as anchormen? A refusal to show the lesser-known sports or the qualifying events as they attract insufficient advertisers? There’s a very real chance that in eight years time the television rights to the Games will have been sold off to a subscription-based channel. It’s being discussed, and given the present government and the present Culture Secretary, it may well happen.

For now, though, we’ve had wonderous coverage, provided by the Olympic Broadcast Service and distributed by the BBC: if you wish to know what things may be like in the future, read up on the atrocity dished up by NBC in America.

Although I now joyfully effuse about the Games with the zeal of the convert, there’s been one thing that’s disappointed me. I may be wrong in this as even I have had to leave the sofa every so often, but in all the time I’ve spent basking in the radiance, I’ve yet to see anything at all of Ken Livingstone. Without Livingstone’s work, his enthusiasm, his love of London, we probably wouldn’t have been given the host role in the first place. If he’s been excluded, or written out of the history, or worst of all just forgotten, it would be a tragedy. Ken deserved to be there. I hope he was. I hope that, even if he wasn’t there, he was proud.

The Women’s Pentathlon is just finishing: each competitor staggers into the arena and across the finish line, those who finished faster rushing up and embracing them; an ever-larger group of exhausted humanity rejoicing in their collective achievement.

Now then: how far ahead can you book tickets for Rio?


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