Where is the missing gold?
I may sound like a character from The Ring but while returning to the BBC Olympic website, which has been my default action during any spare moment since the games began, I am sure I saw that we had reached the number of 13 golds. A short while later it had changed to 12. Where has our missing gold gone?
There does appear to be a real possibility of building on the Golden Twelve and even stretching our golden haul to match or even exceed that of some fabulously distant period in our history when we managed to gain 14 golds in one Olympics!
I’m not really sure why I care.
Who and what can we blame for the Olympics? Some arrogant French nobleman with a misplaced belief in the moral worth of the English public school system!
What are they today? In Beijing they are a blatant political statement by a ruthless, totalitarian and repressive regime which has misused scarce funds to produce one of the most expensive and misleading advertisements in the history of uncaring governmental excess.
But I still care.
I am firmly behind our cyclists as they participate in some oddly named and totally incomprehensible version of bike riding. I have become passionately interested in versions of boats I did not know existed before the start of last week. I have not sniggered at people dressed as if they were going to a formal dinner party, sitting rigidly with a fixed expression as if trying to ignore the fact that they are on a horse prancing sideways in some sort of camp equestrian skipping motion. I have held up my crucifix and flicked holy water at the TV screen when the gymnasts have defied all natural laws with their impossible cavortings. I have been mystified at the inverse relationship there seems to be in rowing between the increasingly chunky physique of the rowers and the decreasingly small pieces of material they choose to row in!
And I do care. I care passionately that we ‘do well.’ If that means that we get medals in minority sports where virtually no one knows what’s going on that merely shows how clever we have been in concentrating resources where we can get the best returns.
I may sound like a character from The Ring but while returning to the BBC Olympic website, which has been my default action during any spare moment since the games began, I am sure I saw that we had reached the number of 13 golds. A short while later it had changed to 12. Where has our missing gold gone?
There does appear to be a real possibility of building on the Golden Twelve and even stretching our golden haul to match or even exceed that of some fabulously distant period in our history when we managed to gain 14 golds in one Olympics!
I’m not really sure why I care.
Who and what can we blame for the Olympics? Some arrogant French nobleman with a misplaced belief in the moral worth of the English public school system!
What are they today? In Beijing they are a blatant political statement by a ruthless, totalitarian and repressive regime which has misused scarce funds to produce one of the most expensive and misleading advertisements in the history of uncaring governmental excess.
But I still care.
I am firmly behind our cyclists as they participate in some oddly named and totally incomprehensible version of bike riding. I have become passionately interested in versions of boats I did not know existed before the start of last week. I have not sniggered at people dressed as if they were going to a formal dinner party, sitting rigidly with a fixed expression as if trying to ignore the fact that they are on a horse prancing sideways in some sort of camp equestrian skipping motion. I have held up my crucifix and flicked holy water at the TV screen when the gymnasts have defied all natural laws with their impossible cavortings. I have been mystified at the inverse relationship there seems to be in rowing between the increasingly chunky physique of the rowers and the decreasingly small pieces of material they choose to row in!
And I do care. I care passionately that we ‘do well.’ If that means that we get medals in minority sports where virtually no one knows what’s going on that merely shows how clever we have been in concentrating resources where we can get the best returns.
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The bronze in the pommel horse shows a disturbingly expensive area of future squandering of cash in an arena in which we have had little success in the past. My god! If we can win a medal in gymnastics then we might start winning in track and field and get amongst what one commentator described as the ‘Formula 1’ medals!
Meanwhile only another week to get through and this torture will be over leaving only four whole years to worry about what sort of attempt we make of this Pyrrhic honour!
I wonder who will be Prime Minister in 2012. Whoever is Prime Minister I am absolutely sure that one small ageing relic will still be smiling her tight little smile as, in non estuarine English, she declares the games open.
Who knows, I might actually have had the opportunity to burn the candle (which even now has its face to the wall in my living room) of the other ageing woman.
What a nasty and yet strangely comforting thought!
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