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.

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.