Olympics

What a good Olympics we are having. But it has been interesting to hear the post–event interviews with the British athletes who are actually winning a few gold and other medals for once. When asked what they feel, “relief” seems to be the surprising commonest answer, often coupled with some technical remarks along the lines that they were glad that they had been able to “raise the strike–rate to 41.8, and execute in the final 500”, or whatever. The way we think about the Olympics has gone from “it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part” where the emotion is surprise and delight at making the final, to the Weakest Link, where the great fear is “…and Britain, you leave with nothing” after four years of killing yourself training to the exclusion of all else in your life. It’s the American/Ozzie professional mentality that the papers have been saying for years that we ought to emulate if we want to win enything in the modern era. Still, I kind of miss the great British tradition of amateurism, sportsmanship and getting a first from Oxford without doing any revision.

Labels: sport