After the unbearable tedium of the European Championship (the fact that the final was an exact repeat—Greece 1, Portugal 0—of the opening game put the redundancy of most of the intervening ones beyond doubt), this enthusiast approached the Athens Olympics with a sense of weary duty. I wondered if I still had the hunger, the discipline, to sit through the grueling schedule of late-night medal ceremonies and reruns of races that I’d already watched a dozen times. To be honest, there were moments, before it all started, when I considered hanging up the remote.
Such doubts proved short-lived as the Games got off to the best possible start with an unscheduled, possibly even mythic event: the mixed doubles motorcycle sprint time trial and road race. Only one team took part but the rumor, eventually confirmed, that “the Greek pair”—as Kederis and Thanou became contemptuously known—had ended up in the hospital provided the first twist in a series of engrossing stories within the all-consuming narrative of the Games. We expected this one to conform to an established template: outright denial followed by qualified admission (“It was the cough mixture!”) leading to eventual confession (“I was so full of pills that I rattled”). As it turned out, though, our craving for justice was simultaneously satisfied and thwarted by the story’s non-denouement. By handing in their accreditation, the Greek athletes denied us definitive closure. This was all the more palpable since, in every other way, the modern Games have sought to eliminate uncertainty. The technology of the photo finish is so finely calibrated as to make the idea of a dead heat seem an archaic residue of the failings of the human eye. Even if the three Kenyan steeplechasers had tried to cross the line together, they would have been shown to have done so successively.
In every event (the gymnastics, most controversially) sportsmen and sportswomen are constantly outstripping our ability to assess what they are doing without the adjudicating support of technology. This did not, at first, appear to be the case with team Great Britain, who left us contemplating the not unfamiliar prospect of serial humiliation in event after event. In those early days the Acropolis loomed above the traffic, as Don DeLillo puts it in The Names, “like some monument to doomed expectations.” Things ended up rather nicely—climaxing with the alchemical surge of the final Saturday—but one of the defining moments of the Games was, of course, the catastrophic meltdown suffered by Paula Radcliffe in the marathon.
Victory and triumph over adversity (as supremely achieved—twice!—by Kelly Holmes) are uplifting, but defeat and failure can be utterly transfixing too. The nature of the race and the unique demands made on participants by the marathon meant that what happened to Radcliffe lay beyond the usual explanation that “on the day” Mizuki Noguchi was the better runner. This was not just long-distance Henmanism; it was an encounter with destiny in the form of a series of intensely compressed, incremental realizations.
When Elfenesh Alemu went past her, Radcliffe realized not only that she would not win gold but also that she was out of the medals. As soon as she realized this, it became clear that there was no point even finishing—which meant that she was finished. Athletes often talk of hitting the wall. Radcliffe had been through that wall so often she didn’t know it was there. And then, weirdly, the road itself had become a wall and it was all around her and there was no end to it in sight. It was like watching someone having a complete crack-up before your eyes. As such, it made superb television. (The grassy verge on which she ended up even lent a Zapruderish touch to the footage.) Athletes deny nine-tenths of themselves—to adapt what John Berger said of Mondrian—so that they can pack the remaining tenth with incredible intensity and purpose. While plenty of people succumb to the urge to give up (going to the gym, trying to be an artist), it goes pretty much unnoticed. But for Radcliffe this was both a public and a complete ontological collapse. And it happened, let’s not forget, on the very day that that icon of modern despair, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, was stolen. Who needs art when you’ve got sport?
Tears of one kind or another were everywhere in evidence at these Games. Enough were shed on my sofa to leave me repeatedly and blurrily amazed by sport’s capacity to reach depths of emotion that used to be regarded as the preserve of high art. The American novelist Andrew Holleran is right: most of the time “tears on TV are like the come shot in a porn film.” At a time when our responses to everything—especially so-called tragedy—are consistently being cheapened, coarsened, and preprogrammed, sport accesses some zone of shared feeling that remains mysterious in spite of the familiarity of the clichés by which it is routinely articulated. Wordsworth claimed to have thoughts that lay “too deep for tears,” but the tears that left Matthew Pinsent a quaking hulk on the podium came from so far within they were practically chthonic.
Moving though that was, what really got to me were the comments from Barney Williams of the Canadian crew, who said that being “part of one of the most exciting races of all time [was] as stimulating as winning a gold medal by three or four seconds.” The majority of the occasions that left me blubbing involved some display of sportsmanship like this: when the decathletes, shattered by their exertions of the last thirty-six hours, embraced each other; when the beaten Bernard Lagat shared El Guerrouj’s joy at winning the 1500 meters that had eluded him for so long.
By contrast, the idea that winning is the only thing has become so entrenched in football as to render the sport abhorrent as often as it is thrilling (it was also one of the reasons why the Euros ended up being such a bore). Two days after the Games began, Jimmy Floyd Haselbaink scored a goal against Newcastle with his hand, thereby making a nonsense of the whole game (it’s called football for a reason). Again and again in the course of the Games we were reminded not simply of the rightness of the Olympic ideal that taking part is glorious in itself, but also that this quaint idea might actually enhance the greater glory of winning. (Perhaps, to put it more cynically, the great virtue of the Games is that the cheating takes place offstage, invisibly, chemically.)
The joy of taking part holds good irrespective of the perceived worth or silliness of the sport in question. There is always a great deal of debate about whether minor sports deserve to be included. On the evidence of these Games the debate should be whether the big ones need to be excluded. The results suggest that, for leading tennis players and football teams alike, an Olympic gold medal, far from being the ultimate prize, is an international equivalent of the League Cup (or whatever it is now called). The sports that work best are those for which the Olympics are the unquestioned summit of exposure, recognition, and achievement. Take badminton, for example. The badminton rocked! A million miles away from the dreamy country house idyll of David Inshaw’s lovely painting in Tate Britain, the semifinals of the mixed doubles had an intensity to rival that seen in any sport. It was the intensity of concentration that was especially marked, and this, I suspect, is another reason why I and so many other people found some of the less visually rewarding events so engrossing. Attention deficit seems less like a disorder, more a glimpse of the next stage of human evolution. There will come a time when the ability to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes will appear as mysterious as a Chardin. In the meantime we have those photographs of table tennis players, fixing their attention on a white ball floating in the middle of their foreheads like a bubble of pure thought.
Sorry, where was I? Oh, right, the so-called minor sports… That’s another thing that always amazes about the Olympics: how interesting it is to watch sports in which one has no interest and which one has never even considered playing. I draw the line at basketball (an “armpit sport,” as DeLillo calls it) but I really like watching sports I would hate to have to play. Hockey, for instance: a game that involves so much stooping that getting a puck in the teeth actually comes as a relief from the chronic pain in your lower back. For back pain, though, the gold medal has to go to the weight lifters. I loved watching the weight lifters (though while doing so I was often and unfortunately reminded of Craig Raine’s line about dogs who “shit like weightlifters”), especially the super-heavyweights, lifting really superheavy weights. Can you imagine trying to do that? The breakfasts alone—twenty eggs, a dozen steaks—would have been enough to kill me, but, as a spectacle, it was utterly addictive, watching the bar bend under the weight, wondering if someone might actually burst before your eyes. I also found it strangely soothing to turn on the television and find the sailor Ben Ainslie—an Ahab in the era of downsizing and cost efficiency—duking it out in some endless and, as far as one could determine, fiercely one-sided battle against the cruel sea. It was good to know that he was out there and, for me at least, he still is. We will come back to this.
Some of these minor sports would undoubtedly benefit from a change of costume. It is extraordinary that the judo jacket has remained unchanged for so long, since the participants have to spend so much of their energy wrestling it back into some kind of order. The show jumping would be more fun if the participants dressed like cowboys and jumped over bits of abandoned wagon trains. In other sports a more radical overhaul is needed. Archery would be improved if the archers were shooting at moving targets: antelope maybe, possibly human beings, ideally (and this would really make a sport of it) each other. Come to that, why not combine three-day eventing, trap shooting, and archery and just call it cowboys and Indians?
The most compelling events, though, need no dressing up because they have such a naked connection to their biological origins: the ability to run away from or catch up with something or someone; to jump over a yawning chasm or river; to swim across a lake. (The corollary of this is that it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which the triple jump might be of use. Stepping stones in a wide stream, perhaps?) One might go further and say that an event’s pulling power is directly linked to the stage at which it emerged as a human activity. After running, jumping, and swimming came throwing, fighting, gymnastics (or tumbling, anyway), and all the equine stuff pioneered by the Mongol hordes or some such. Eventually you got the invention of the ball (as significant in its way as the invention of the wheel) and, as we became adept at using and making tools, so we saw the development of racket sports, the pressurized tennis ball, Air Jordans, and so forth. But the primal origin of the basic athletic events means that, give or take a few details, they are pretty well unaltered by technological refinement. Plutarch might have been writing for the Observer Sports Monthly when he wrote of “men who, for deftness of hand, speed of legs, and strength of muscle, transcended human nature and were tireless.”
And what could be more basic—what could be more grounded in the makeup of the species—than our love-hate relationship with what we now know to be gravity? There’s no point making light of it: the Olympics would be nothing without gravity, especially those events in which, as Bob Dylan put it, they’re all doing their best to deny it. A certain number of falls—sacrifices, I suppose you could call them—is essential to the spell of gymnastics: they remind us that, in the course of almost every maneuver, the bar or beam is regained against all odds (and how lovely it is to see the coaches of the gymnasts on the bars, standing by, ready to catch them should they fall). What in the Bible was termed a miracle is now known as a Ginga.
The extreme degree of difficulty that characterizes the performances pervades every aspect of gymnastics. Photography, which does so well by other sports (the intense temporal concentration of the sprints, for example, is matched by the visual compression of the telephoto lens), has great difficulty isolating the split second of weightlessness that is, quite literally, the high point of many gymnastic moves. (The problem, paradoxically, is the ease with which fast shutter speeds render any instant weightless.) We, in turn, have difficulty judging what we are seeing—and so, it seems, did the judges. The reason for this is tangled up in the idea of perfection. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony Roberto Calasso writes that “perfection doesn’t explain its own history but offers its completion.” This is not true of gymnastics. Gymnastics gives us a glimpse of perfection—but every time it does so it instantly raises the bar of the possible (how about throwing in another half twist?), thereby postponing the idea of completion. It is also constantly commenting on its own history, quoting from the great previous masters and the moves—the Katchev, the Korbut—named after them. (This form of worship has reached its most extreme, monotheistic tendency elsewhere, in the high jump, or the Fosbury, as it has now, effectively, become.)
We will, as they say in sports broadcasting, return to the gymnastics shortly, but let us first concede what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade: that the Olympics are, along with everything else, a festival of Eros. Whatever your preferred body type or sexual orientation, there is someone here to fixate on. The Bulgarian female hammer throwers don’t do anything for me, but there is, as they say, a bun for every burger. For fans of women’s weight lifting, the highlight of the Games in this respect was probably the opportunity to see Nataliya Skakun’s amazing snatch. There seemed almost no consensus among my female friends as to which events worked best for them. Several felt that no one on the track could rival the laid-back sexual magnetism of the man in the commentary box. No, not Jonathan Edwards—Michael Johnson! Some liked the sprinters; others found them too muscle-bound, an opinion widely denounced by male gay friends who expressed widespread disappointment that, in the pool, amphibious, dolphin-gray speed suits had taken over from what Alan Hollinghurst, in The Line of Beauty, terms “knob-flaunting Speedos.” Their interests were better served by the synchronized divers and, of course, by the male gymnasts.
In The Farewell Symphony Edmund White recalls how, in the 1970s, intensive workouts left him with forearms the girth of a horse’s withers, a “waist as slender as a napkin,” and a “butt as imposing as a diva’s bosom.” The problem was that he became so muscle-bound that he could no longer scratch his back or peel off a T-shirt. The bodybuilder’s goal is appearance, not action. It was only when the gymnasts did something mortal—applying chalk or tying on wrist supports—that the quotidian superfluousness of their arms really became apparent. On the apparatus, those boulders of muscle on arms and shoulders represented the minimum size necessary to perform the superheroics demanded by the sport.
As for my old-fashioned hetero self, it’s the leggy jumpers that have always done it for me. (Oh, lucky sand to have had Heike Drechsler landing in it all those years!) This time around it was the women’s beach volleyball that was the unquestioned erotic epicenter of the Games. The sexual element is latent in the word beach but even here it was both intended and incidental. That’s the great thing about it! The athletes are not using their perfect bodies just to model all that Lycra—and that makes it even sexier. If this kind of thing becomes more overt it will be diminished. Yes, part of me longs to see the outfits get even skimpier. Another part of me realizes that would be a bit cheesy—and then another part of me thinks, well, it’s only every four years.
And that’s the killer. We’ll have to wait another four years to live through all this again because it’s over. It’s over—and the thought of that is too much to bear. For those few weeks in August our lives were packed with meaning and purpose (get home and watch the Olympics—or, in my case, since I was at home already, just watch the Olympics). It was great watching the old faces (Svetlana Khorkina, the tragic diva of the asymmetric bars; Frankie Fredericks looking like he had been running since the dawn of time) and it was great watching the new faces (Jeremy Wariner springing to the front of the 200 meters like sprinting’s answer to Eminem), but it was actually great just watching. We spent half the day watching and a lot of the next morning reading about what we had watched and, as a result, we felt… fulfilled. One day led perfectly to the next. We were never bored and even if we were bored at least there was something on telly. How did we get by without it? What are we going to do without it? How are we going to survive until “the youth of the world”—a swelling bit of oratory from the closing ceremony that always brings a tear to the eye—gather again in Beijing? For the moment all I can do is think of Ben Ainslie. I like to think he’s still out there somewhere, doing battle against the waves, like some Japanese soldier of the Second World War, refusing to admit defeat, refusing to admit that it’s over.
2004