2012 - The Real Olympic Experience

After Athens in 2004, the UK Government poured floods of cash into Olympic sport so as not to be embarrassed at London 2012. It paid off. Personally I’d have walked 500 miles (and probably 500 more) just to be part of the Games even if we’d had no medal contenders at all. Angie and I, thanks to our respective employers, had contrived to have our pictures taken whilst clutching one of the elegant torches (left), and in May I had stood for ages outsde County Hall awaiting the official Torch Procession to arrive in Taunton, through which a perma-tweeting Will.I.Am duly took his turn in the ten-week relay.

Having moved to Somerset, then Cardiff, the opportunity to be a ‘Games Maker’ volunteer passed me by, which left no option but to buy tickets and rely on Mum and Dad’s generosity and spare bedroom.

I don’t care that Britain’s rubbish at water polo, handball or weightlifting. That’s why I applied for, and gratefully received, tickets for those sports at the London Games, and thoroughly enjoyed watching them. It transpired there was no need to walk 500 miles. 20 miles by train from Billericay to Stratford was all it took to transport me into the heart of 2012, the brand. To parrot the proposed slogan by the fictional organising team in BBC’s wonderfully tongue-in-cheek comedy, TwentyTwelve, this was definitely the Way To Go!

So come August 2012 Angie and I arrived in Essex primed for our initiation into the live Olympic experience. We’d already had a week of the Games on TV to stir the juices; now for the real thing. It was around teatime on 6^th August that we changed trains at Stratford and travelled the DLR to the ExCel Arena where I had tickets for the Men’s 105kg weightlifting. All around us, the docklands were particularly heavy with Eastern European and Asian visitors. A bloke from Kazakhstan was roaming through the crowds bearing two hefty sacks, doling out free unofficial yellow baseball caps bearing the five-ring logo, and we helped ourselves to a couple.

Weightlifting had always fascinated me. While highlights suited some events, this sport should be viewed as one whole theatrical performance in two acts: Snatch and Clean & Jerk, with the perfect showstopping finale represented by the medal ceremony. I recalled the mighty Soviet Vasily Alexeyev smashing heavyweight records back in the Seventies as the epitome of muscleman drama. Then in 1988, ’92 and ‘96 I‘d been gobsmacked by the tiny Turkish powerhouse Naim Suleymanoglu. Perhaps the 2012 105kg competition wasn’t quite as absorbing, but there were still plenty of agony and ecstasy moments en route to the Ukranian flag being raised. A pity the Pole Bonk didn’t win but you can’t have everything! A few of my photos and video clips illustrate what we saw, heard and felt that night.

  

                               Toroksiy (Ukr) takes gold                Efremov (Uzb) hits the floor             

The following afternoon, we made our first entrance to the Olympic Park itself. Angie was probably as much entranced by the prospect of browsing amongst the high-end stores of the Westfield shopping centre as the sport, but I found the mix of unaffordable goods and crowds reminiscent of Boxing Day sales rather nauseating. TV screens in the Food Court kept us abreast of the action taking place and, in case we forgot where we were, the windows offered a tantalising view of the athletics stadium. A multinational throng filled the walkways and I was itching to join them.

Once we’d found our way to the security gates, through which we passed mercifully without incident, the ‘park’ opened out before us. The giant purple and pink information boxes directed the crowds to their various destinations, the quirky 2012 logo ubiquitous on signs, T-shirts and banners. Over to the left was the curious red Orbit ‘helter-skelter’ structure, ahead soared the athletics stadium and we passed beneath the ‘wing’ of the Aquatic Centre which was that afternoon hosting some Diving. I was oddly overwhelmed by the amount of sporting action taking place all around me but it was being part of such a huge good-humoured throng that was the most exciting. There was no boorish, booze-filled ranting, just shiny, happy people of all ages and, judging by the array of flags carried or draped over shoulders, all nationalities.   

                                  

There was rain in the evening air but, when we returned later in the week, the scene was bathed in hot sunshine, bringing out the cacophony of colour in the landscaped riverside gardens and the masses milling through them. The buzz was intoxicating.

So was the sport itself. I’d long considered handball to be disgracefully neglected in schools on these shores. It’s much more exciting than basketball and you don’t have to be seven foot tall (but it helps!). Even when the USA’s professional ‘Dream Team’ entered the Barcelona arena, I’d still rather see a tight clash in handball.

The Montenegro v France women’s clash in the Copper Box was a superb example. Before an enthusiastic crowd of 4,550, there was never more than a few goals between the sides in a  game eventually decided by a last-second penalty. Star player Bojana Popovic was in tears of joy (left).

The match was over far too quickly but it mattered not one jot that we headed back to the station in darkness and drizzle. Two days later, it was a glorious Thursday afternoon when we repeated the journey to Stratford, this time for not one but two women’s water polo matches.

  

Even out of the sun it was nonetheless hot and humid inside the temporary building and, sitting high in the stands, we were sweating buckets. Thank goodness for the water points strategically placed below the entrance, although there were lengthy queues to endure. The shiny turquoise pool below was strictly out of bounds, of course but it wasn’t long before the water was rippling with sporting action.

A pre-event video had helpfully explained the rules, without which we’d have been hopelessly lost. I hadn’t appreciated that the players are constantly either swimming or treading water. It looked exhausting, especially with the competitors indulging in under-water dirty tricks, tugging and pulling at limbs beneath the surface, requiring the close attention of umpires. 

The first match at 2.30 involved Great Britain and Italy, with seventh and eighth places up for grabs. It provided our only taste of a partisan Team GB audience and the home team started strongly. However, after four tiring quarters, it was the white-capped Italians who won 11-7. After a break, the other defeated quarter-finalists, China and Russia, met in what proved to be a real nailbiter. Apart from a few clusters of red or red-white-blue flag-wavers, it was a less raucous affair but highly entertaining for the neutrals. At full-time, it was 14-all, but after overtime, China held sway 16-15. Phew! It had been a brilliant finale to our live Olympic experience.

I wanted to savour that atmosphere in the Park, not wanting to leave. After all, I was hardly likely to be part of such an occasion again in my lifetime so it was an inwardly emotional Mike who with a deep sigh weaved through the throng towards the homebound train. 2012 would prove an incredibly popular fortnight, thus infuriating the mostly Tory supporters who’d declared it a waste of time and money which would be riven by bankruptcy and rampant terrorism and were forced into a volte-face. 

When it comes to the Olympics, there’s always a lot of hot air expelled over the word ‘legacy’. Yes, it costs a phenomenal amount of money, and taxpayers need to know that some of that dosh is returning to government coffers, be it through commercial revenue, sponsorship, increased tourist expenditure or whatever. However, as long as the Olympic Park isn’t covered in rubble and tumbleweed like Montreal and Sydney, I’d be happy.

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This seems an appropriate point at which to end my sporting memoir so far. While most of the action I’ve watched has been via TV, occasionally radio and increasingly online, there is nothing better than the live experience. Of course the additional nervous energy expended in support of a particular club/country/individual adds to the flavour of the occasion. Whether winning or losing, the euphoria or misery tend to be heightened by a magnitude of ten. Belonging to a faction, a gang if you will, in the stands, pub or Fanzone can make sport extra memorable, even if the majority of members won’t rmember much of it the following day!

I will never, ever witness QPR winning the Champions League, so I can barely imagine the sensation of those Liverpool fans who travelled to Madrid earlier this year. It must also have been amazing for fully paid-up members of the Barmy Army who celebrated England’s cricket team finally getting their hands on the World Cup. Do fans of Celtic, Juventus, Bayern Munich or the All Blacks ever tire of their run of success? Probably not. And yet probably the most enjoyable personal sporting memories are associated with events at which I was neutral.

It’s a seductive mix of the sport itself and the aura derived by a packed arena of passionate fans, and nothing exemplifies this better than our visits to London 2012. Were there riots when GB lost to Italy in the water polo? Nope. No wars, no threats, no nationalism or xenophobic rantings, just good-humoured multinational crowds mingling as part of one family.  I remain an unapologetic proud sporting pacifist and hope I will continue to be entertained as such for the remainder of my life.

Olympic Poster Boys and Girls

In 2012, this towering image was the sight welcoming those of us arriving at the Stratford Olympic site by train. Five of our greatest sports stars and medal hopes stood tall in their natty Team GB kit, gazing towards the middle-distance, their stance promising to deliver success for the entire nation. In this era of intensive marketing and publicity campaigns, the use of poster boys and girls to sell tickets and buy hearts and minds has become oh-so familiar, part and parcel of any sporting event.

But do these elite Olympians always fulfil that promise? In London’s case, Tom Daley and Phllips Idowu didn’t. Gymnast Louis Smith missed gold on the Pommel Horse by a whisker. Laura Trott was a revelation in the velodrome then heptathlete Jessica Ennis proved one of our most popular winners on ‘Super Saturday’.

Back in 1984, the USA would have had an embarrassmet of riches clamouring for Olympic titles. With the USSR, Cuba and East Germany boycotting the Games, they were bound to dominate, those blasted Stars and Stripes fluttering above podia all over the place. However, Carl Lewis was the main man. He and I have so much in common, too. Well, we were born on the very same day, but that’s where the similarities end. In Los Angeles he romped to four gold medals, in the 100m, 200m, relay and long jump. Job done.

Four years later, South Koreans weren’t exactly well endowed in the athletics or swimming stakes. In Cuba’s absence, their boxers were expected to do well although it took blatantly biased judging for Park Si-Hun to win the light-middleweight title. I don’t know who was the principal poster boy or girl at Seoul but it should have been the archer Kim Soo-Nyung. The Asian champion, she took gold in both individual and team competitions.

In Barcelona, Spain eclipsed the Koreans with the arrows and ruled the roost at the regatta. A certain Pep Guardiola was a presumably proud gold medallist in his home city as part of the football squad. However, if you have a world-class track athlete, he has to take precedence in the promotion business. That man was Fermin Cacho. He was by no means the favourite to win the 1500 metres; that was the Algerian Noureddine Morceli. However, the world champion struggled with a slow pace, which instead played into Cacho’s hands perfectly.

It was a shame that the Spaniard didn’t run the Princes Street Mile a few weeks later, coincidentally taking place while I was on holiday in Edinburgh. I found a spot near the finishing line from where I could observe the likes of Steve Cram, Matthew Yates, Sonia O’Sullivan, Yvonne Murray and the Barcelona 800m champion, Ellen van Langen. The men who finished 10^th and 3^rd behind Cacho, David Kibet and Mohamed Suleiman, finished one-two that chilly September afternoon.

The Olympics returned to the USA with indecent haste in ’96. Carl Lewis was still going, albeit only in the long jump which, of course, he won for a fourth time. However, Michael Johnson was the new track megastar on show, and he didn’t disappoint. Naturally I was cheering for perennial runner-up Frankie Fredericks and Britain’s Roger Black but nobody was ever going to prevent the tall Texan from capturing the unique double of 200 and 400 metres. I thought him a cocky sod, largely because of his golden shoes and blingy necklace, but in reality he seemed quite humble, given his incredible speed. That unique upright style of running with short choppy strides ripped up the coaching manuals but what the heck? It worked like a dream. After 300 metres of the one-lap final, Johnson left Black et al for dead. Only three days later, he shattered his own 200m world record. Messrs Bolt and van Niekerk have since beaten Johnson’s times but he is surely one of the all-time athletics greats, latterly becoming an acerbic and knowledgeable pundit in the BBC studio.

In Sydney, Ian Thorpe was superb in the pool but the indigenous Australian 400m runner, Cathy Freeman was the main draw. Her only viable challenger, reigning champ Marie-Jose Perec, mysteriously withdrew from the Games, leaving the Aussies with a sure-fire gold medallist. So instantly recognisable was Freeman that she also lit the Olympic flame and, to cap it all, she ran in an all-in-one bodysuit. After all this attention, a silver medal would have been considered a disaster. Fortunately for the organisers, the nation’s darling withstood what must have been extraordinary personal pressure to follow the script and take gold.

For historical reasons, nobody would begrudge Athens from hosting the 2004 Olympics but Greece wasn’t exactly a hotbed of sporting supremacy. Yet as the Games drew closer, the country was to produce two of the fastest sprinters on the planet. Kostas Kenteris won the 200m gold in Sydney and Ekaterina Thanou became European champion at 100m, and this was the pair the Greeks hoped would come bearing golden gifts in 2004. However, just before their home Games, they staged a motorcycle accident as means of avoiding a third drugs test. The authorities saw through the deception and they were chucked out of the Olympics altogether. All was not totally lost for the Greeks because Fania Halkia compensated by taking the 400m hurdles but she, too, failed a dope test in Beijing, by now a familiar story.

In the new millennium, China were beginning to rival the USA as an all-round sporting powerhouse but they were lacking a face with whom both the nation and the whole world could recognise. Enter Liu Xiang. He was an extremely popular 110m hurdles victor in Athens, breaking Colin Jackson’s world record in the process. Unfortunately, at the start of his first round heat, the new cultural icon aggravated an old Achilles injury and was forced to withdraw creating a stunned silence around the ‘bird’s nest’ stadium. The problem also kept him away from the 2009 world championships and in 2012 he fell. He was no drugs cheat but was dreadfully short of luck when at his peak.

Which brings us back to London, and Jessica Ennis. She didn’t have the charisma of Mo Farah but she was one of our hottest favourites, albeit in an event where a single false start, three no-jumps or a tweaked hamstring would spell disaster. Luckliy for all concerned she blitzed the field, launching the event with a sensational 110m hurdles and completing it in style over 800m.

In 2016 Rio’s iconic event was probably the beach volleyball on the sands of Copacabana, where Brazil’s men took gold and the women silver. And very glamorous and exciting it was, too. However, there was no escaping the face of footballer Neymar and it was fitting that in a packed Maracana he scored the decisive penalty which netted the young side its first Olympic title.

Olympic Athletics: Higher, Faster, Further

The Olympic Games gave me the opportunity of witnessing athletes from around the world, not only the faces familiar from the Grand Prix events I’d see most weeks during the summer. Not only Eastern Bloc legends but also Africans, Aussies and New Zealanders seemed exotic species in the Sixties and Seventies. Thus I grabbed the opportunity to watch the likes of javelin thrower Ruth Fuchs, miler John Walker and the Kenyan Kip Keino once every four years.

Africans weren’t as prominent on the athletics scene as they are today, and Keino was probably the only name and face I would recognise prior to the Munich Olympics in 1972. That all changed after the 400m hurdles final. David Hemery was fancied to repeat his Mexico triumph and led around the final bend, only for the little-known Ugandan John Akii-Bua to stride past in the inside lane, break the world record and keep on going! His was a great story.

That year, Valeri Borzov and Renate Stecher each claimed a sprint double, and Britain’s hopes of long-distance gold were upset by the Finn Lasse Viren, who won both the 5,000 and 10,000 metres. I’d wanted the familiar Belgian Puttemans to win but the bearded Viren was a shock winner. Despite being largely absent from intervening competition, he actually repeated the double four years later. My interest in the field events was also sparked by a great contest in the men’s javelin. Long before the era of Zelezny and Backley I recall going into our close afterwards hurling a stick (fortunately no cars or people were around) trying to replicate the efforts of the Soviet Union’s Janis Lusis (his sideboards as mighty as his reputation) and West Germany’s small but chunky Klaus Wolfermann. I recall watching the Latvian’s final throw landed just 2cm short of Wolfermann’s mark.

The events proceeding on the greensward may have been fitted into the TV schedule around the track races but they generated just as much drama. The shot putt wasn’t as watchable as the rest; simply enormous muscle machines hoisting a cannonball into the turf. At least the javelin, discus and hammer prolonged the viewer experience, watching the flight of the weapon and trying to guess the distance.

I would try to copy the triple jump on sandy beaches in Cornwall or Spain but, try as I might, there was no danger of threatening the distances achieved by Victor Saneyev, who won three consecutive Olympic golds. He wouldn’t have lived, though, with the likes of his successors Edwards, Olsson or Taylor.

There was no danger, either, of me even attempting a high jump, even had Dick Fosbury not in ’68 innovated his backward ‘flop’ which has been the only tactic in town ever since. 51 years on, I still can’t fathom how the human body can contort itself to clear a bar way above its height. In fact, the whole mental process required is beyond my on limited imagination. And so I am happy to watch in amazement a succession of ultra-tall beanpoles striding in an arc to the crowd’s rhythmic claps before leaping head-first up and hopefully over the delicately balanced metal rod.

The steely-eyed Croatian Blanka Vladic epitomises the female high-jumper although not even she could get within a foot of the best achieved by the incredible Cuban, Javier Sotomayor.  Whilst six feet five, he wasn’t quite as skeletal as many fellow competitors but his speed and technique won him the Barcelona gold medal in 1992 and in Salamanca a year later the world record of 2.45m which still stands. That’s more than eight feet, the height of my ceiling! However, my favourite Olympic high jump champion must be the Swede Stefan Holm. Less than six feet tall, he nonetheless scooped the top prize at Athens, clearing 2.36m, 55cm above his own height. One up for the little guy!

Unlike Sotomayor, I don’t think he ever failed a drugs test, unlike our own sprinting superstar, Linford Christie. Along with his contemporaries Lewis, Johnson, Mitchell et al, his achievements are somewhat tainted by his association with illegal supplements. His disqualification at Seoul was quickly overturned and he was imperious at Barcelona four years later. Even I was caught up in the emotion of the event. With few Americans in the frame, he had a glorious opportunity to repeat the feat in Atlanta only to be chucked out of the final for two false starts.

The 400m Hurdles is such a killer event. Sprinting a whole lap while finding additional bursts of energy to leap over ten barriers must be a true lung-buster. Consequently I always doff my (imaginary) hat to the masters and mistresses of the race. From David Hemery in 1968 to the peerless Ed Moses in the Seventies and Eighties, then Essex’s own Sally Gunnell in ’92, I usually make a particular point of watching the one-lap hurdles competition. It rarely disappoints.

Of course, sprints are usually settled by mere hundredths of a second, which adds to the excitement of watching. There’s nothing worse han nipping out for a biscuit and finding I’ve missed a whole bloody race. Slow-motion highlights can’t beat watching it live. Yet the relays usually require multiple viewings as the eye can’t possibly take in all the action from all eight or nine lanes. It’s not just a matter of who’s winning on the home straight; there’s all the trips, stutters and fluffed exchanges which demand the attention. Take the Beijing women’s 4x100, for example. The Americans dropped the baton in their heat, leaving the Jamaicans as hot favourites in the final, with the Britons ever hopeful of a bronze. Watching it live, I was incredulous that the Russians and Belgians were first and second to cross the line. What happened? The answer is the usual stuff: all those training drills and it all went pear-shaped on the second exchange. Eight years later, a retrospective drug test failure by one of the Russian athletes meant that only four of the eight nations in that race were officially ranked, and of all nations it was Belgium who became Oympic champions!

One of my most memorable sprint relays, which bring the Olympic athletics programme to such a frenzied finish, was not one of the Bolt-tastic triumphs of Jamaica but the men’s 4x400m in London. I’ve become accustomed to the USA rompng home by huge margins but on his occasion, Ramon Miller held on to the American leader and swept past to gain gold for the little ol’ Bahamas. A week earlier, the nation went nuts for Team GB on what became known as Super Saturday. I must confess I missed most of it, including the victories of Jessica Ennis and Greg Rutherford. However, there was no escaping the phenomenon that is Mo Farah who pulled away with that familiar sprint to clinch the 10,000 metres. Unless you’re one of Tommy Robinson’s racist cronies, how can you not love Mo? His Rio double was the icing on an especially lavish cake.

Over the years on the box I’ve witnessed some spine-tingling races involving Coe v Ovett, Michael Johnson, Usain Bolt, Christine Uhuruogu’s totally unexpected 400m finish in Beijing and many others.  But the Olympics aren’t all about medals and world records.  Sometimes you have to admire those who have qualified because they are their country’s finest, be they from the USA, China, Togo or Vanuatu. Simply achieving your best on the greatest stage must be an ambition for any young athlete. Mind you, attaining no fewer than five personal bests in two days and capturing gold at the end must be an experience to savour like no other.

One of the most memorable performances came from the 21 year-old Belgian Nafi Thiam in the Rio heptathlon. In Briton, the multi-disciplinary event was all about Jessica Ennis-Hill repeating her 2012 gold. However, she was overshadowed by the six-foot youngster who rose to the occasion brilliantly. It proved to be no flash-in-the-pan, either. Thiam has since become world and European champion, too. Oh, and she is also a geography undergraduate at Liege. Who said athletes must be totally single-minded to win? Successful Olympians can be human too.

Strokes of Genius: Swimming

As someone who can’t bear to get his face wet, let alone attempt a racing turn, I am not a natural fit for swimming as a spectator sport. However, with so many medals at stake during the first week of the Games, I always find my attention pulled by some kind of magnetic force to the Olympic pool. I may not be much of a swimmer myself but there’s something elemental about the sport. All the action is contained within a 50-metre tank of water and, whatever the stroke, it’s a straightforward race with the added appeal of a potential record time being achieved.

My earliest memories of Olympic swimming date from 1972. At Munich, two competitors dominated proceedings, hogging the headlines not only in the pool but in the Games as a whole. Australian Shane Gould won five medals, including three golds, each of them in world record times. What made her achievement so astonishing was that she was only fifteen years old! This was to be her first and last Olympics as she bowed out of public life just two years later.

However, even Shane was overshadowed by Mark Spitz who won seven of his events, including three relays, each associated with that WR symbol. Only Michael Phelps at Beijing has matched that incredible feat. The American swimming machine scooped almost half of all medals on offer in the pool at Munich, and has usually dominated every four years, leaving the Aussies trailing a distant second. That just makes it even sweeter when the Stars and Stripes freestylers are defeated.

In 2004, the 200m final provided the hotly-anticipated showdown between not two but four superstars. In the glorious open-air arena, the Aussie man in black, Ian Thorpe eventually reeled in his Dutch friend, rival and 100m champion Pieter Van den Hoogenband on the final lap, leaving a 19 year-old Michael Phelps in third.  What a race!

Britain has rarely excelled in the Olympic front crawl sprints. Billericay-born Mark Foster was an outstanding 50m speed merchant with all manner of titles to his name but when the five rings fluttered, he never even made a podium. Thank goodness for Rebecca Adlington, who swam under even the British media radar in Beijing to win both the 400m and 800m events, also eclipsing the venerable Sharron Davies as our most famous female swimmer.

Up to that point, most of Team GB’s gold medals had come in the relatively sedate breaststroke. David Wilkie became a national hero in ’76 when he reversed the 100m placings to beat John Hencken in the 200m showdown and become the only non-American male champ in Montreal. Incidentally, the East Germans were almost as dominant in the women’s races. Duncan Goodhew (in Moscow, which the USA boycotted) and Adrian Moorhouse (Seoul) kept the British success going into the Eighties but when it comes to global domination, no Brit has hit the heights scaled by Adam Peaty. At the time of writing he has eight world and twelve European titles, plus an amazing eleven world records, and those numbers will surely increase in the next few years. For the casual swimming viewer like me, it’s when he launches Team GB’s gold rush in the Olympics that Peaty comes into his own, as in Rio last time out Currently, no-one in the world can touch him in the sprints and Tokyo beckons next year…

Over the years, the less well-known disciplines have also yielded some classic Olympic performances from nations other than the USA, UK or Australia. The Seventies triumphs of the East German women were sadly tainted by suspected state doping practices but the West German Michael Gross’ reputation as an Eighties great remains unsullied. Had he been American he would surely have scooped umpteen relay golds but it’s for his 2.13m ‘wing-span’ in the butterfly that he is best remembered, and which earned him his ‘Albatross’ epithet.

If swimming was Take That, backstroke is the Jason Orange of all disciplines. Even the Brits have yet to excel at it. Neverthless, when someone is so commanding in their event, sometimes you feel compelled to watch and admire. So it was at Barcelona in ’92 when Hungarian Kristina Egerszegi plundered the IOC’s gold reserves so effectively, not only in the two backstroke finals but also the 400m individual medley. I was surprised to learn that no other woman has surpassed her tally of five individual Olympic titles and she retired after the Atlanta Games at just 22.

Giants of the sport like Phelps, Spitz and Peaty demand respect, of course but, to a chap who has never managed to complete a full length, there is another whose endeavour against the odds elevates him head and weary shoulders ahead of the rest as my personal swimming hero. Arise, Eric ‘the Eel’ Moussambani! The 22 year-old from Equatorial Guinea became one of the stories of Sydney 2000 when he swam his 100m freestyle heat in almost two minutes, appearing to struggle just to finish. The icing on the cake was that he actually won the race, because the other two competitors were disqualified for false starts! That’s what the Olympics is all about…

Olympics: Pommel and Pummel

Munich in 1972 was a watershed Games. Staged in more or less the same time zone as the UK, I was able to watch most of the action live as it happened. The Beeb’s theme music of jaunty Bavarian yodelling is as fresh in my head now as it sounded then.

While Mark Spitz’s seven swimming golds and the excitement on the athletics track inevitably hogged my attention, the UK TV audience in the first week fell in love with a bunch of astonishingly supple teenage girls performing extraordinary acrobatics. And it was all perfectly legal. I’m referring, of course, to Gymnastics.

During the Seventies, my own experience of the school gym left me with lasting mental scars.  I’m sure the Moscow and Bucharest training camps left their pupils with more than the occasional rope burn or acrophobia atop the climbing frame, but the regime yielded results which won over all bar the most vehement anti-Communists. While Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci stole the show with their cute smiles and historic ‘perfect ten’ scores, my favourites had to be the Soviet pair, Ludmila Tourischeva and Nelli Kim. In Munich and Montreal, as grand old ladies in their early twenties, even I was captivated by their grace and gravity-defying somersaults. Since then, I have gradually become immune to the charms of a sport which relies heavily on facial expressions and music to win over judges. Apart from a springier carpet for the Floor exercises, little has changed in the intervening four decades but not even the crowd-pleasing Simone Biles or the success of Britain’s Beth Tweddle will make me watch women’s gymnastics nowadays.

In contrast, I haven’t completely lost my fascination with the feats of strength exhibited by the toned blokes on the Rings, High Bar or Pommel Horse. Vitaly Scherbo scooped six golds at Barcelona and Alexei Nemov was such a brilliant all-rounder in Sydney but it was the Japanese men in the Seventies who first won my admiration. They weren’t built like hammer throwers but the sculpted muscles required to execute those routines on the Rings were incredible. Others were so good on a single apparatus that their names remain associated with particular moves decades later. The Tkachev on the High Bar and Magyar on the Pommel Horse resonate today, but it was amazing to witness the original Hungarian’s minute of magic in Montreal.

While gymnastics is still an immensely popular ingredient in the first week’s schedules, boxing provides a counterpoint to the athletics programme in the second. I was never so attracted to boxing that I eagerly anticipated the early rounds. It really all boiled down to that lengthy succession of finals on the very last day of competition. With the athletics programme completed, these days I just find the boxing finale a terrible anti-climax to the previous fortnight of sporting endeavour, drama and excitement. It wasn’t always so. 

I remember ‘our’ Chris Finnegan being lauded for his Middleweight title in Mexico City more than fifty years ago but Britain had a long wait for our next Olympic champion. In the interim, we had to make do with various plucky semi-finalists like light-middleweights Alan Minter (1972), Richie Woodhall (1988) and Robin Reid (1992) and our bantamweight Pat Cowdell in ’76. In the same year, light-welterweight Clinton McKenzie may well have joined them had he not been drawn against the incomparable shimmying Sugar Ray Leonard in the third round.

The blatant result-fixing at Seoul was an Olympic low-point. Both the sport and the Games themselves were brought into disrepute by South Korean officials physically attacking a referee and a defeated home nation bantamweight, presumably assured that he was certain to be awarded victory, refusing to leave his chair in the ring even when the arena’s lights were switched off. Actually, that was quite funny. 

The running points-for-punches tally was in my opinion far superior, especially for the TV spectator, and the opportunity for retrospective cheating amongst judges was eliminated. When the powers-that-be switched to the pro-style ‘ten point round’ format in Rio it created more corruption than ever. The adjudication process, number and length of rounds and headgear may change but there have been some cracking Olympic fights, stories and personalities over the years.

I haven’t necessarily watched them. Had I but known that the Spinks brothers would become so well known, perhaps I would have paid more attention to their triumphs at Montreal. The same is true of the super-heavy crunch between Riddick Bowe and the then-Canadian Lennox Lewis at Seoul which Lewis won in a dodgy stoppage decision. The two have hated each other ever since.

Of course, that pair went on to extraordinarily lucrative careers, as did Ukraine’s Wladimir Klitschko, a champion in Atlanta, and Oscar de la Hoya, in Barcelona. Evander Holyfield only won bronze in ’84, as did Floyd Mayweather twelve years later, although his semi-final defeat to a Bulgarian was hugely controversial. The biggest guys inevitably attract the biggest headlines, sprouting speculation about their potential as prospective professional world champions. The engaging but lumbering Audley Harrison looked the part at Sydney but his pro career was a disaster. In contrast, 2012 gold medallist Anthony Joshua has more than justified the hype.

While the UK media tend to fixate on their own and the Americans, I have strong memories of fights involving Cubans. As natives of Castro’s socialist republic, they were forbidden to turn pro, and so the top stars would compete in multiple Olympics. We will never know whether the great Teofilo Stevenson or Felix Savon would have rivalled Ali, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson or the Klitschko brothers in their prime but as amateurs they reigned supreme in their respective eras. I recall seeing the smooth-as-silk Stevenson making mincemeat of US hopeful Duane Bobick in Munich and flattening John Tate at the following Games.

Savon’s ding-dong with a Russian in the final at Sydney saw him equal Stevenson’s record of three consecutive golds. Mario Kindelan only won two and, being a lightweight, was even smaller than me! I wouldn’t have fancied my chances with him in the ring, though. Unbeaten as an amateur for five years, he stood between Britain’s teenage Amir Khan and the Athens title. It was one of the last fights I watched from start to finish, engrossed not only by Khan’s amazing maturity at only 17, but also the reigning champ’s peerless quality. It wasn’t a close contest but definitely one of the most memorable Olympic bouts I’ve seen.

Olympics: I Could do That!

What a weird and wonderful mix of sports! Modern Pentathlon? Archery? Judo? Horse Dancing (aka Dressage), Freestyle Wrestling? Fencing? But that’s the beauty of the Olympics; it introduces you to sports which may be an essential part of life in Japan, Hungary, USA or Uzbekistan but alien to most Brits.

Only once every four years do I ever contemplate watching a BMX race, diving or taekwondo but during that fortnight they are just as vital as any 100m sprint. What about Jade Jones’ double triumph? I get goosebumps just remembering Lutalo Muhammad’s heartbreaking last-second defeat in the 80kg final and post-bout interview in Rio. Admittedly these sports are only considered by the BBC to warrant live coverage when there’s a Brit in contention but they make for really exciting viewing from the armchair.

Of course, these are not events in which I was ever likely to participate, be they in an Olympic arena or my local sports centre. Reverse scissor-kicks, triple somersaults in pike position, Ippon and epee thrusts look great on screen but bear no resemblance whatsoever to my own physical world. However, the Games do feature activities which do. Take table-tennis, for instance. Even in my fifties I can just about spin a ping-pong ball over the net and so I can appreciate the remarkable skill and reactions displayed by the superstars. No matter that they tend to be from Scandinavia or the Far East; rallies involving the likes of China’s Ma Long can be jaw-dropping.I also used to love playing badminton, the perfect social indoor sport for people like me.

It was even one of the very few sports in which I won a trophy (left). OK, so I owed that share of success almost entirely to my Billericay Rotaract mixed doubles partner Kirsten and the rest of the team but I’ll accept glory whenever I get the chance! Yet, as with table-tennis, Olympic-level ‘badders’ is a different kettle of fish. The shuttlecock is caressed, lobbed or smashed with such speed my eyes can barely keep pace.

It is also a sport which brings much-coveted medals to Indonesia, as in Beijing, 2008 but even Britain reached the podium four years earlier, thanks to Nathan Robertson and Gail Emms. Their silver medals meant more to me than any Team GB golds at Athens because they earned them in an event I could easily recognise.

Riding a bike is something most of us have tried at some point in our lives, even if it merely served as a diversion from school homework or means of transport to and from friends’ houses. Hurtling through the trees above Rio or the streets around the Acropolis is something else, even if the scenery is lovely. Then there’s the indoor variety, at which the Brits have become rather adept in the last decade or so.

Not all the disciplines are notably telegenic. Team pursuits simply require viewers to watch the clock while the Madison is just mad. During the race, to the casual fan the velodrome track merely appears to be a chaotic mess of bikes travelling at different speeds. How they calculate who wins is beyond me. Commentators Hugh Porter and Chris Boardman seem to know what’s going on but it’s beyond my comprehension. My favourite has to be the Keirin, the one when competitors follow a gently accelerating moped before sprinting like crazy for the final few laps. Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and Jason Kenny have all struck gold in this event in recent years. When Kenny’s final in Rio was re-run twice and the Brit was extremely fortunate not to be disqualified, It turned out to be a very late night, but there was no way I was going to bed without witnessing the emotional conclusion to the unfolding drama.

Basketball was a school staple but hardly suited to a vertically-challenged chap like me. Mind you, I could jump and dribble a bit; it’s just the matter of propelling the ball into the basket was a glaring weakness of mine. I believe this is rather important. It’s not a favourite spectator sport of mine and neither is volleyball. I get bruises on my wrists just watching. However, the introduction of beach volleyball was a winner. I’ve seen it played on patches of arid sand on various Spanish playas, usually involving pairs of deeply tanned and improbably hirsute and darkly tanned senores or lissom bikini-clad senoritas. To be honest, Olympic competitors don’t look much different and, whether on Horseguards Parade or Copacabana Beach, the matches have proved unexpectedly enthralling.

Finally, I come to hockey. When I was at school, it was still considered a game for girls. However, on one of the few occasions we boys were let loose with those heavy curly sticks, I found I was quite good. Maybe it was just in my head. Years later, indoor hockey was more my game but, for the IOC, hockey is strictly an outdoor event, even if the green grass has been replaced by a garish blue synthetic surface.. Growing up, hockey at the Olympics seemed the preserve of Pakistan or India. Then, in Seoul, the British men’s team thrilled us all by taking gold. Sean Kerly and Imran Sherwani became household names and Barry Davies’ commentary on the opposition’s gaping defence, “Where oh where were the Germans? But, frankly, who cares?” shocked me for his then-rare burst of patriotic bias.

Almost three decades later, our women emulated the men’s class of ’88 by taking the title in Brazil. I watched the live coverage as they won an agonising penalty shootout against the Dutch. Compared with those distant days chasing a ball, fingers frozen to the stick, across a muddy sports field, it was on another planet, but as a sporting spectacle it was a world-beater.

Summer Olympics - the Gift of the Greeks

In May 1997 I embarked on a coach tour of Southern Greece, taking in Athens and the Peloponnese. The Parthenon, Delphi and the ancient Mycenae fortress were all amazing places but possibly the most memorable activity of the whole week was joining a rag-tag bunch of international tourists in an impromptu sprint in the original athletics stadium at Olympia. Why is that? I’m no runner (although I did finish second), nor even a scholar of Ancient Greek social history. No, it’s the aura of the Olympic Games which has seeped into my bones. The very first Games took place on that very spot in 776BC and, although you’ll be relieved to know we weren’t channelling the spirit of those pioneering Spartans, Corinthians and Arcadians by running naked, for just a few seconds we were part of a fantastic tradition.

There is something so fundamental, primitive even, about man (and then it was only men, of course) seeking to run faster, throw further or jump higher than anybody else with no financial inducement. How things have changed. Amateurism did persist until the 1980s, although under-the-table payments were surely paid to the top athletes for many years. The gruesome spectre of performance-enhancing drugs showed its ugly face in Seoul then crass commercialism and vulgar nationalism by NBC spoilt the Atlanta Games of 1996. At least we could rely on the BBC to be an impeccably impartial host broadcaster in 2012. Er, no. That was the one disappointment of that wonderful fortnight, of which more later.

Like their classical Greek counterparts, the modern Olympic Games have rooted themselves deep in my own psyche. It’s one of the few sporting occasions which has sustained my considerable interest over fifty years. It helps having the BBC retain its broadcasting rights free to the masses but there’s something about the world coming together every four years, competing in a mix of sports in a kaleidoscope of flags and costumes in and around one city. I can do without the extravagant opening ceremony but the lighting of the flame would stir my blood in anticipation of a true festival of sport. Similarly I would find the extinguishing of said flame a fortnight or so later as an incredibly moving and emotional image, symbolising far more than the imminent flights home of a few thousand men and women in tracksuits. It represented the fact that I’d have to wait four years before I could next enjoy the Games. Like Misha the Moscow mascot in 1980 I would unashamedly shed a tear.

The first I remember watching on what must have been blurry black-and-white television was the Mexico City event in 1968. There was David Hemery’s 400m hurdles world record, Bob Beamon’s phenomenal long jump, Lilian Board’s 400m battles with Colette Besson and Chris Finnegan winning a boxing gold for Britain, and I lapped it up.

It hasn’t all been centred on the fortunes of what is now branded Team GB. Just as well because, before the modern fetish for lavishly state-funded Olympic glory-hunting, every British medal was savoured like a cup of water in the Sahara. In my lifetime, all the way up to Sydney in 2000, we would reap at best only a handful of golds. While I enjoyed witnessing our star athletes standing proudly on the podium, the Olympic also provided fleeting fame for those whose sports were just as obscure as their names. For every Mary Peters or David Wilkie winning races live on our screens, there would be a clip of an army officer wielding a skinny sword as part of Modern Pentathlon or another posh bloke in a red jacket completing a clee-ah rahnd on a horse or some old boy under a hat firing a rifle, shaking hands with an official and shuffling off into immortality within the Trap shooting fraternity.

For just a few short weeks, we were whisked away into weird and wonderful worlds of judo, fencing and archery. Most of them, if you started devising an Olympic programme from scratch, would never make the cut. Regardless, I would eagerly and dutifully do my utmost to record all the results in my increasingly tatty Radio Times pull-out. No reliance on Google searches or Wikipedia back then! For the 1976 event I even bought a paperback book into which I’d squeeze their names and nationalities in my finest microscopic capital letters. Athletics, swimming and boxing were filled pretty comprehensively while sections for sports such as Wrestling tended to be riddled with holes. They would probably be dominated by the Soviet Union and East Germany anyway. No Brits, so zero coverage.

Some little-known sports suddenly became hugely popular in this country, not necessarily linked to British success. Gymnastics in the early Seventies may have been the fiefdoms of the Eastern Bloc and, in the men’s events, Japan but in ’72 Olga Korbut’s sweet smile and mini-pigtails delighted the nation. In 2016 the sport has been opened up to allow 16 countries a share of the medals on offer, from the USA and Russia down to Spain and Switzerland. Even Britain has grabbed some memorable golds. In those dark days of giant empires and shy impoverished continents, only about 120 countries took part but that tally has almost doubled. The splintering of the Soviet Union, opening up of China and the American universities developing talents from previously little-known African republics and Caribbean islands have all helped make the Olympics truly global in both participation and opportunities for bringing home a medal or two.

Politics began to interfere with sometimes deadly consequences, as in Munich. Grim boycotts cast a dismal shadow over the 1980 and 1984 Games in particular as the Cold War protagonists embarked on last-ditch displays of willy-waving before Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika hastened what I hope will prove the end of crazy nuclear posturing, Trump and Putin notwithstanding.

All the while, the sport continued to delight, even of some of the world’s best were missing from the biggest stage. Professionalism may have heralded lucrative Diamond Leagues and other world championships but an Olympic gold remains the pinnacle of sporting achievement. That’s why, in the past few decades, millionaire golfers and tennis players seem happy to set aside a few weeks in their money-making schedules to helicopter into the Olympic village. Some, like Andy Murray or Justin Rose, might even expend enough energy to actually win. While I welcome the introduction to the Olympic family sports such as triathlon, BMX, Taekwondo and Beach volleyball, I remain a sceptic about the fit of long-standing professional favourites. What I will make of Sport Climbing or Karate at Tokyo next year is anyone’s guess.