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.

Football's Boom Boom Boom!

The last few decades have witnessed extraordinary sums of money cascading into football. Admittedly an awful lot cascaded out again into the grubby mitts of agents and chief executives, but much of that has been invested in the game itself – or at least the tip of the mighty pyramid which supports the global sport.

It’s not just about the billions thrown at Premier league football by Sky, BT and now Amazon; it’s the rest of the world. The Manchester clubs, Liverpool and Chelsea can afford to splash out £50 million for players all bar the true cognoscenti will not have heard of. However, even Real Madrid, the club which made its modern reputation from hiring top-gun galacticos for vast sums (Sanchez, Figo, Ronaldo, Bale et al) is being left behind by Qatar-bankrolled Paris St Germain. I’d become used to world records being raised by a few million Euros at a time, but when PSG blew the transfer market apart with their 222 million Euro acquisition of cry-baby Neymar, followed by a 180 million option on the teenage Mbappe, my hands were thrown high in horror.

Things have got seriously out of hand. Like London house prices, hyperinflation at the top has an impact on every layer below. I write this after a summer transfer window awash with laughable sums being vaunted for unknown Portuguese or young defenders from our own League One who will probably end up being loaned out again. Has the whole world gone stark staring mad? Newly-promoted Fulham shelled out well over £100m on new stock just to give themselves a fighting chance of staying up.

Of course, I and most other football fans have been making similar exclamations all our lives. Even I am too young to remember the first six-figure transfer between British clubs (Alan Ball in post-World Cup 1966) but I do vividly recall the revelation of, I think, the first £100,000 teenager.

When I read about Arsenal spending such a huge sum on Peter Marinello from Hibs in January 1970, I probably almost choked on my Alphabetti Spaghetti. I presume his value was inflated by a vague physical resemblance to George Best but sadly his talent proved nowhere near as similar. Without a phalanx of psychologists and welfare coaches, the wee boy from Edinburgh never really justified the attention he received in the media. Although he scored on his debut – never a bad thing – injury and the celebrity lifestyle thrust upon his unsuspecting shoulders reduced his contribution to a mere three goals in three seasons before returning to Scotland.

A few months after the Marinello deal came our first £200,000 footballer, Martin Peters. However, I remember the most surprise at the time was not concerning the headline figure but the fact that the West Ham stalwart was heading to Spurs while the 30 year-old White Hart Lane legend Jimmy Greaves was the makeweight in the opposite direction. In the end, Spurs proved to reap the greater benefit because the alcoholic Greavesie retired the following year after only 38 appearances to spend more time in the pub.

With no mid- or close season windows in which to funnel all attention and pointless airtime-filling speculation, transfers were a year-round feature, as much part and parcel of football as they are now. It’s just that there was no internet, YouTube footage or ‘super-agents’ to whip up expectations. David Nish’s £225,000 move from Leicester to Brian Clough’s League-winning Derby side in 1972 raised eyebrows as he was ‘only’ a defender, then centre-forward Bob Latchford’s £350,000 fee in 1975 shelled out by Everton to Birmingham shattered the record. With consumer prices increasing by 25% a year at the time, perhaps we were accustomed to such inflation, and football transfers were merely symptomatic of mid-Seventies economics. Good for Bob, though!

In 1979, Clough's Nottingham Forest made Trevor Francis the first domestic million-pound footballer, doubling the previous record. Things went a bit berserk that September when Manchester City, way before their current excesses, found over £1.4 million to bring midfielder Steve Daley from Wolves. He was a decent player but hardly in that class. He even signed a ten-year contract – but left after two. Until the days of Robinho (Man City again) and Veron (Man Utd), Daley was considered the biggest waste of money in English football history.

During the Eighties, the financial clout of Serie A and La Liga constantly raised the bar, as the likes of Ray Wilkins (Milan), Mark Hughes (Barcelona) and Ian Rush (Juventus) went abroad in exchange for several million quid and head-turning signing–on fees and continental salaries. When Dennis Bergkamp came the other way for £7.5 million in 1995 - making even Arsenal worth watching for a change! – the dye was cast for a new international market in which Premier League clubs were leading buyers and sellers. However, the biggest leap occurred in July 1996 when Newcastle swooped for Blackburn’s Alan Shearer, England captain and goal scorer supreme, at a cost of £15 million. The floodgates opened….

The same has happened with wage bills, too. My heart bleeds for the poor dears who have to live on a basic £5 million plus bonuses and commercial extras in return for a few hours a week kicking a ball. Yet there is a vast disparity in salaries evident in English football. That has always been the case; it’s just that there are far more noughts and commas involved in the numbers these days.

If there is a salaries Grand Canyon between the Premier League and League Two, it’s probably even wider across the England-Scotland border. In 2018, Aberdeen’s star striker Adam Rooney headed south for a pay rise. He had been lured not by a club in the EP, nor even the Championship. No, he will be playing for non-league FC Salford! Inevitably the headline-grabbing contracts dished out to the Hazards and Pogbas of this world distort the overall PL average. In 2016-7, Man Utd’s annual wage bill was £264m, compared with newly-promoted Brighton’s £11million. No doubt Albion’s players earned a Premier League premium but nevertheless it’s hardly surprising that there is a widening chasm between the top six and the rest. It wasn’t always so but, unless more Middle East kingdoms get involved I can’t see the rest being allowed to catch up.

Another negative aspect of football as big business is the modern obsession with measuring players by salaries and, increasingly, transfer fees. The bigger the fee, the better the player, right? Is some non-entity plucked from the Turkish league for £12 million superior to an international star whose last club move came five years ago for half that amount? And where does that leave the one-club players - the Brookings, Gerrards and Scholeses – whose loyalty is considered so quaint and old-fashioned? They didn’t even take the lucrative pre-retirement bundle of dollars offered once by the USA and now China and Japan. No, you can’t value everything in terms of numbers. Football is better than that.

World Cup Memories - 2018

And finally we come to 2018. For all the shenanigans around the selection of Russia as hosts, and the potential of the whole month being an almighty Putin vanity project, this World Cup has been celebrated as one of the most exciting in living memory.

Did we miss Italy or Holland? Not a jot. From the first night, when Russia’s much-maligned side smashed five against Saudi Arabia, to the six-goal finale, there was so much to enjoy. At home, participation in the global FIFA Fantasy league added an extra dimension. Amidst all the action there were many brow-furrowing hours spent contemplating transfers, captaincy selections, balancing the huge stars like Messi, Modric and Hazard with the less familiar names from Egypt, Colombia, Poland, etc. But really it was about the football!

The thrilling Iberian derby on day two left us licking our lips in anticipation of further riches. Against Portugal, Spain seemed to have done enough before Cristiano Ronaldo produced a trademark free-kick in the 88^th minute to complete his own hat-trick and a three-all draw. However, European champions Portugal were surprisingly weak and not even CR7 could haul them into the last eight. Apart from one sublime goal which only he could score, the other giant of the game, Lionel Messi, was also a subdued figure. His lacklustre, ageing Argentina side were awful against Croatia and they, too, bowed out in the second round.

The reigning champions Germany were also woefully off-form and were sensationally eliminated in Group F after losing to Mexico  (an excellent match) and South Korea. Meanwhile, the Germans’ 2014 bunnies Brazil had bounced back to their best in qualification and apart from a 1-1 draw with the Swiss, were looking ominously good. Coutinho provided some magic but I’m afraid their flamboyant forward Neymar will be remembered only for his pathetic diving and play-acting. His 10,000 volt jerks against Mexico will – sadly – live long in the memory. I missed Brazil’s quarter-final elimination at the hands of Belgium – attending India v England cricket at Cardiff – but, for all Neymar’s undoubted skills, I didn’t miss the preening prima donna at all in the final week.

Belgium had been rather fortunate themselves to meet Brazil. In their Round 2 fixture against Japan, I was enthralled by an amazing second half in which their unfancied opponents soon went two-up. With under half an hour left, Belgium seemed down and out yet ended up 3-2 winners after a fabulous injury time breakaway finished by Chadli. Phew!

Spain were also chock-full of household names, from De Gea to Iniesta, Pique to Busquets, Isco to Ramos. But, faced with the host nation and their fervent fans in the Round of 16, the superstars were surprisingly tamed. Penalties decided the matter and Russia advanced. It seems unthinkable that we will probably never again see many of these great players on the global stage.

Like Russia, Nobody had given England’s new-look side much chance of reaching the knockouts let alone challenging for the Cup itself. Only two of their wretched 2014 Eleven – Henderson and Sterling – were in the first-choice starting line-up. However, while Harry Kane was falling over and banging in the penalties, and Stones and Maguire were leading the defensive line, optimism built steadily. England slammed an unprecedented six past Panama and found themselves with a relatively simple path to the semis via Colombia (and a successful penalty shoot-out!) and Sweden. Suddenly, that refrain of “Football’s coming home” was everywhere. Massed streaming even sent The Lightning Seeds’ masterpiece of hope over expectation, ‘Three Lions’, back to number one in the charts after twenty-two years. Manager Gareth Southgate’s elegant waistcoat transformed fan fashion and even Kyle Walker proved popular.

In the semi-final versus Croatia at the Luzhniki Stadium, Kieran Trippier’s fifth minute free-kick sent the fan-zones delirious under a fountain of beer, but Luka Modric and his mates weren’t giving up. After the interval, Croatia clawed their way back into the game. Their efforts were rewarded when first the hard-working Perisic fashioned an equaliser, then Mandzukic nipped in behind Stones for the winner.

And so the tournament reached its climax in Moscow. Not with Brazil v England, as I had so naively predicted, but France v Croatia. On paper it appeared a delicious final but showpiece games are notorious for their ability to disappoint. As in so much of the 2018 World Cup, tradition was ripped up. With Modric pulling the strings, Rakitic and Perisic running with purpose and the full-backs haring down the flanks, Croatia ripped into the formidable French defence but couldn’t break through. I was aghast that France went one-up following a Griezmann dive. Perisic equalised then came another highly dubious penalty decision, this time courtesy of the controversial Video Assistant Referees (VAR). I began to lose interest when France widened the gap in the second half but had to admit a 4-2 World Cup Final is one to savour, whoever emerged the winner.

Like England, the redeveloped French team is remarkably young. Didier Deschamps was widely derided for omitting stars such as Martial, Lacazette and Payet but his squad delivered the goods. Their brilliant full-backs Pavard and Hernandez are only 22, the outstanding centre-back Varane is 25 and then of course there is the electrifying 19 year-old winger, Kylian Mbappe. The old guard of Messi, Ronaldo, Iniesta, Modric, Suarez, Cavani, Hummels and Marcelo probably won’t be around in four years’ time but a new generation of galacticos are already in place.

After Russia, the 2022 tournament will be a different kettle of fish. Located in the desert state of Qatar, dry as a bone but awash with cash for FIFA votes, it will take place in the heart of the European football season to avoid the searing summer heat. With the youthful players at their current disposal, France must fancy their chances once more. But if 2018 showed us anything, it is that the top nations can’t take anything for granted, even the champions. Four years is a long time but I’ll have to be patient. Roll on the next World Cup!