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.