TIME OUT

Wenden’s the official swim-team captain, but there are our hands-on captains too, now that he’s all around the Village networking with fellow junior Olympic delegates. These can be captains of almost anything: of fun, of swearing, and, most importantly, of big trouble if you break the rules of who you are — in other words, never get above yourself in the company of veterans. And these personnel can change from day to day, depending on who you hang with and who can give you big trouble. You tend not to finish a sentence in the dorm without swearing, or at the very least some sort of rhyming slang. If you ask someone why they plaster themselves in toiletries from dawn to dusk, you’ll get, ‘Because it shows you were brought up, not kicked in the fucken guts and told to get up.’ Or you’ll see someone tear his shirt while dressing for town, and he’ll curse that fucken Don and Bert because it was his last clean one, and then he’ll be in his Reg Grundies and trying to insert one of his Ginger Meggs into his fucken jeans and he’ll fall over laughing, and very soon everyone’s guffawing their head off. Everyone, that is, except Wenden and the manager, because they’re out hobnobbing it in the trousered world. When I ask Spiderman why his particular crew tended to crow about everything they buy in town, even when it’s a total dud, he looks me in the eye to quip, ‘And there are people who don’t?’, and suddenly I’m in the know.

I don’t go into town as often as the others. It’s embarrassing anyway — not being able to buy anything because I spent almost all my dough on a puny JVC recorder before I even arrived. Every day, someone comes back from town trying to outdo the others with the biggest suitcase-style double tape deck, or Nikon or Canon camera. Or they’ll spend up on a whole bunch of minor stuff like sex toys, albums by the Stones, and silly Bavarian knick-knacks like clocks and traditional dolls. Now we have Sticky Fingers playing all day, along with this weird but interesting album by an African group called Osibisa. Who ever heard of African pop music? That’s Jim Findlay’s album. Anyway, at least all the new music gets your mind off the fresh-set cement stink still hanging around the building.

People say Leonard Cohen is depressing, but they must only listen to the words, because the music’s as uplifting as any I’ve heard. It’ll always remind me of Munich, I’m sure. And everyone knows song lyrics are second-rate anyway, because they have to rhyme and fit in with the music. But every now and then if you do actually listen to Cohen’s words, you hear a couple of gems, like a German Shepherd’s ‘collar of leather and nails’, and ‘when we were almost young’. The only reason I know Cohen’s music from a bar of soap is because my old Valley Pool squad mate Arthur Shean left his album at the Ming Hotel when Talbot told him to leave for having the odd night out and otherwise daring to have a life. That’s what Jon says anyway.

This afternoon, I’m on my bed with my favourite Cohen chorus from ‘So Long, Marianne’ blasting away in my ear when there’s a knock on the door. Thinking it’s just a dorm crew returning from town keyless, I walk over drowsily naked and swing the door wide open, but it’s definitely not them. Instead, there’s this whole multinational posse of bright-eyed budding chefs de mission looking for Wenden. As I cover myself and say Wenden’s out looking for them somewhere, one of the less humour-strapped girls pledges, ‘We won’t tell, I promise,’ and I slink back to my bed and imagine people I’d meet in Cohen’s songs: unscrupulous bluedbloods of breeding, beauty, or taste, in Hydra cafes or mysterious retreats, now sipping ouzo and now swaying on a building chorus, their torments eased by Cohen’s priestly tones. I’ve heard some of them are people you might want to meet, like Marianne and Suzanne, though not necessarily the ‘Sisters of Mercy’. Cohen’s songs have the same powerful effect on me as Peter Sarstedt’s old number, ‘Where Do You Go To My Lovely’, whose rags-to-riches heroine receives a racehorse for Christmas from the Aga Khan, steals a painting from Picasso, and wears a topless swimsuit for an even suntan on her back and legs. (Really?)

I know there’s a contradiction between being a rooter for flower power and a sucker for high-strung, jetsetting libertines, but if I had to choose right now, it’s flawed glamour and the Olympics. Where else would you want to be this month than under all those translucent stadium covers, stretched across the sky on poles like giant webs?

What are the modern Olympics, anyway? I wonder. They’re definitely some kind of fabulous pop-up micro-state, a roving Vatican whose month-long gig pimps tired capitals into flesh-friendly festivals.

Today it’s the official swim-team photos. First the full team pose; then the medallists, like me, holding our hardware to the camera before the usual biting to test if they’re real, though in my case there is far more gold in the teeth doing the biting. The photos are a day earlier than scheduled because Talbot’s off to Canada tonight — it’s no longer a rumour. He’s the only one not in uniform, as if to say, ‘It’s all on my terms now.’ Instead, he’s come encircled in this uber-bland slab of Bavarian suede falling right to his thighs. It’s the garb of a man with no fashion pretensions, bought for him by someone without inclination, from a store full of clocks and lederhosen. Soon we’ve all moved to the food hall, and Talbot’s actually looking happy and excited in his new Alpine burgher blazer. You never use the adjective expansive about Talbot, but that’s how he’s behaving right now. He’s even telling anecdotes from early in his career. This particular one’s a story you read about in the papers sometimes, and now he and the manager Roger Pegram are kind of giggling their way through it, because Roger was there on the night in question. ‘So I saw this scrawny ten-year-old Wenden kid absolutely killing everyone in his first state title races,’ Talbot says. ‘And right then I knew I had to get him into my squad, except he’s being coached by this former SAS brute, Vic Arniel.’

Pegram can’t wait for Talbot to finish. ‘And then you …’

‘Well then I go up to this sopping-wet kid and tell him he should join my squad, but he says right back, “I’m with Mr Arniel, thank you”’ — and the whole table erupts in laughter.

Sometimes I think we should all try to be more like Wenden, who says all his running about with those junior delegate types is to put something back into sport. But knowing me, I’d just think I was trying to put myself back into it.

Neither could I ever be sure the Olympics is the force for good that all those Olympism boosters around the Village seem to claim. Surely the choice of the Village itself for the latest instalment of Middle Eastern terror is designed to grotesquely mock its lofty political pretensions. I’m for the greater good too, but doubt the existence of any measure beyond an avoidance of totalitarianism. Anyway, humans have bumbled along for tens of thousands of years in various forms of rural grind, urban pomp, and ruin, the inventors of wheel, speech, chair, cheese, trousers, and a thousand other useful things passing totally unacknowledged. (But, tellingly, the mythical sixth-century-BC inventor of the modern practice of progressive-overload training techniques, Milo of Croton, is still celebrated in sport folklore. He’d supposedly lifted a newborn calf above his head and then repeated the feat daily until it had famously grown into a lot of bull.)

Am I better off for having achieved some scratchy Olympic glory? I don’t know, but there’s definitely no living to be made, because amateurism looks set to outlive another ice age. I’ve also wilfully abandoned my schooling, and will go home with a degree of sporting fame but not of education, not even my leaving certificate. And there’s no way I’ll be repeating my final year at any of my recent schools as its celebrated-but-obsolete student-jock — a living curio.

Far from becoming more like Wenden, in our final night in Munich I graduate as a clone cum laude of my fellow Lord of the Flies dorm survivors, revelling in degrees of drunkenness with athletes from around the globe and girls from all over Munich — girls who simply scaled the Village fences like the terrorists. In waiting lounges and on connecting flights home — between my occasional but urgent micro-scrutiny of rest-room basins — I’m reminded by teammates of what good form we were all in, yet am unable to recall some of those alleged antics. When I’m bestowed with titles like ‘Master of Mayhem’ and ‘Captain Carnage’, I know they’re taking the piss.