‘Until
yesterday I wasn’t much fussed about the Olympics. But when I watched Andy
Murray win the gold medal, something changed; I found myself suddenly welling
up with tears. I felt quite patriotic,’ the woman said. ‘Do you know what I
mean?’ I didn’t, but I nodded nevertheless. ‘I can’t now wait to watch the
athletics,’ the woman (weighing 15 stones) announced, taking a hearty bite of
her cheese mayonnaise sandwich. ‘I am going to watch them waving Union Jack.’
She smiled, revealing rows of dirty horse-teeth.
I have met
many people like this woman in the last two weeks who were suddenly brimming
with pride and patriotism because Great Britain has won record number of gold
medals (still comfortably less than China and USA, though) in
I-can’t-believe-are called-sport.
They parked
their two ton arses on the sofas and, stuffing their faces with Ben and Jerry, shouted themselves hoarse
as some delinquent looking female boxer beat her Chinese opponent in the
flyweight boxing final. The hysterical commentator shouted that she would now
become the face of the British boxing (not a very pretty face if you ask me).
She has apparently created history; she is the first British woman boxer to win
a medal at the Olympics. Is she the first medal winner or the first gold medal
winner? I don’t know, and I don’t care. I am not interested. Female boxing?
Give me a f**king break.
I don’t
like sport. I hate exercise of any kind. Whenever I get an urge to exercise I
lie down; always works.
I have a
particular problem with the Olympics because it is full of non-sport events.
Such as dressage. What in the name of Buddha is dressage? According to
International Equestrian Federation, it is ‘the highest expression of horse
training’ where ‘the horse and the rider are expected to perform, from memory,
a series of pre-determined movements.’ And a British woman (who looked as
handsome as her horse) won gold in this sporting (!) event. It is a bit like
getting an award for being the tallest Munchkin in the Munchkin country.
Can somebody
explain why running is called sport? Running is OK if, I don’t know, you are a
dog, or are caught shop-lifting, or are a middle-aged fitness freak who goes
running round the block every morning parading his (or her) flabby thighs. What
is not OK is to call it a sport. What does it matter if someone runs 100 meter
distance in 9.64 seconds or 9.57 seconds? I watched (purely by accident) the
100 meters final. After the event (which finished in 9.64—or was it
9.57?—seconds) the winner went round the stadium buzzing like a scalded flea.
You felt like telling him, ‘Dude, calm down now. We know you run fast; you
haven’t found a cure for bloody cancer.’ The guy was so cartoonish, he couldn’t
be real. May be I am missing something here, but what exactly is there to enjoy
watching grown men running as if someone had inserted lighted dynamites up
their bums? Or watching cadaveric women run and jump over hurdles, then run
some more, and jump over some more hurdles. You would be hard pressed to think
of anything more ridiculous (other than perhaps triple jump or pole vault or a
long jump).
Take
weight-lifting. Why would anybody want to watch men and women who look like
they gobble steroid tablets for breakfast, lunch and dinner, trying to lift
ridiculously heavy weights? Invitation to hernia, or a prolapsed colon, or a burst artery, if you ask me. What exactly is being tested here? The
strength? The stamina? I’ll tell you: how stupid you have to be to part with
your cash to watch this rubbish.
I have no
problem if someone wants to chuck discs in his back-garden (as long as they do not come crashing through the window of my house). But to call it sport? You’ve
got to be kidding. What does it mean when someone is crowned in the Olympics as
the best disc thrower in the world? How many people in the world are throwing
discs? Is the winner really the best disc thrower in the whole world, or is he
the ‘best’ amongst a handful of sad blokes (mostly Eastern Europeans, Germans
and Russians I should guess) who have wasted the last 4 years of their lives
trying to find out how far they can throw a f**king disc?
Can
anything be more pointless than cycling unless you get your rocks off watching
anorexic-looking men in skin-tight lycra, parading bulges in front of their
thighs, going round and round for ages? Or men who look as though they breathe
through their mouths row boats as if escaping from Alkatraz? Do it if you want
to stay fit and think you could do with exercise. Doesn’t do anybody any harm,
I suppose, and if it makes you feel better about yourself, go ahead. But it is
no more a sport than those bizarre events listed in the Guinness Book of World
Records.
The little
bit of Athletics I watched, the commentators talked like they had taken the
long distance correspondence course from Mumbai that promises to make you an
expert (in a month) in speaking (the most stilted and clichéd) English. The dude
who won the 100 meters running also won the 200 meters running finals. The BBC
commentator screamed: ‘We can’t call him the greatest as that title has already
been taken’; then, in case the listeners were not clever enough appreciate his
clever remark, clarified: ‘Mohammad Ali.’ (The dude himself wasted no time in
declaring himself a ‘living legend’ and got very cross when some windbag from the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) insisted that he (i.e. the runner) was
not yet a living legend. ‘What else do I need to do to prove myself a legend?’
asked the dude. Well, he can do whatever he thinks he has to do to become
extremely famous. That, I think, will qualify him—or anyone else who has an
interest in becoming a living legend—to become a living legend. Maybe this chap
is a living legend in the community of 100 meter runners; he is certainly a
legend in his own mind.) When a British runner (no doubt unexpectedly) won a
race, probably 800 meters, ahead of Ethiopians, the commentator shouted, ‘Now
we have shown the Africans how it is done.’
. . . Er, the winner looked like African to me: British by nationality,
but clearly African by descent.
The BBC
expert commentators for athletics were Denise Lewis and Colin Jackson—Brits—and
Michael Johnson, an American. (The anchor was John Inverdale who looks like a
slimeball; keep your daughters away from him). Denise Lewis, I think, won an
Olympic medal years ago and has been dining out on it ever since (I won’t be
surprised if she has also received an OBE or an MBE for her services to the
sport). Johnson, too, I think, has won
Olympic medals (I am going to make a wild guess, here—in running). Lewis and
Jackson, surely, are the goofiest people dropped on this earth by the Almighty.
They jumped, giggled, got very excited over nothing, gushed at everything, and
a six-year old would have had more depth to his comments than these two had.
The American, Johnson, by contrast, looked as if he had come straight from his mother’s
funeral. He made serious observations about gangliness of runners’ legs. Must
say Johnson came as a welcome relief from the British comedy duo.
I did not
watch the opening ceremony as I was out of country at the time. A friend, who
watched, told me that they wheeled out NHS nurses for a dance during the
opening ceremony. That is British irony for you. The filthy Tories are doing to
the NHS what Dr Bashar Al-Asad is doing to Syrian people, and in the Olympics
we are parading it as a great British institution. (As an aside, shouldn’t
these nurses have been changing bed clothes, cleaning bed-pans or whatever it
is that people in caring professions do, instead of dancing at the Olympics?)
The British actor, who plays James Bond, skydived into the stadium along with
the queen, in pre-recorded film footage. So that was what Britain had to show
the world as her heritage. A fictional character whose films are produced these
days entirely by American money, and a health service that is melting down
faster than ice in Sahara.
I didn’t
watch the closing ceremony either, preferring to watch, instead, a taped
cookery programme currently being aired on channel 4, called Simply
Italian, fronted by a gorgeous Italian named Michela (and graced, from
time to time, by her equally gorgeous sisters; as Michela and Emi sucked their
gnocchi, smiling seductively at the camera, I wanted to suck their gnocchi
too). I read in the Guardian that everyone from Rolling Stones to David
Bowie turned down the organizers’ offer to sign of the closing ceremony and
they ended up with Take That and Spice Girls. An appropriate ending.
The 25 or
however many gold medals that Britain won at the Olympics are a bit like
British monarchy. What’s the bloody point? I doubt whether anyone will remember
the names of all these gold medal winners, or, for that matter, the categories
in which they won them. What difference are these medals going to make to the
lives of most people? I read in papers that people in Sheffield were ‘dizzy
with delight’ because some woman from that city won a medal at the Olympics.
Sheffield is a piss-poor city with more people on dole than in Soviet era
Hungary. These ne’er-do-wells might get dizzy with delight, but they are still
going to be piss-poor and unemployed, seeing as the economy is going down the
toilet.
I read on
the BBC news that after the ‘disaster’ of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics (where
Britain won a solitary gold medal) there has been massive investment in sport
amounting to almost a billion pounds over the last 16 years. Since 2008 £ 265
million have been invested. This is also a period when Britain and Europe are
in the midst of the worst recession since Black Death. The Bank of England has
reduced the growth forecast to 0. The country is securely in the grip of
double-dip recession. The imports in the last quarter exceeded exports by
several billions, and economy is shrinking. But not to worry; we have won gold medals in cycling and dressage in the Olympics.
Everything is shipshape.
