THE goalkeeper who made the penalty save which won the Dutch women's hockey team an Olympic bronze medal vanished beneath a tidal wave of orange, as her extraordinarily attractive team mates rejoiced with an adulterous relish all over her and I had two reactions. One was to regret rather powerfully that it is unlikely now, at this stage of my life, that I will ever make a medal winning save for the Dutch women's hockey team but otherwise, so what?
For celebrity, like its sister triumph, might well be an post or but it is not half the imposter of success in the Olympics is.
The myth of the Olympics is that success brings international fame, and athletes will do anything for fame. One poll amongst athletes showed over half would take performance enhancing drugs which would guarantee gold, even if one of the regrettable little side effects were death within the year. And for such athletes, death would still be more certain than fame.
Olympic Glory
The melancholy reality of Olympic "glory" is that it is almost always confined to the athlete's home turf. Very possibly, various Finns have been winning all manner of medals but other than tell you their names probably end in-enninn and that if they throw things they certainly grunt in Ugrian I really can't help you. In Finland they are certainly world famous the problem is that the rest of the world doesn't know it just yet, and though tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon never will.
Few athletes actually become world famous around the world, rather just world famous in the country they come from so few that it easy to name them. Of the present generation, Carl Lewis is one Michael Johnson is another. I can't think of any others.
No doubt athletics fans will indignantly point to some Tunisian or Ethiopian and with equal indignation insist that such and such is world famous but celebrity within a small circle is distinction, not fame. The orange heroes of Holland might be yodelling in triumph amid the suds and the loofahs of the team showers, and it would not be unpleasant to join them in their recreations but in Nepal people are remarkably unmoved. Their eyes are on a tiny little wrestler the world has never heard of, and never will, though he is on his way to world glory in Nepal.
In fact, Nepal and other fringe countries are probably more open minded about other countries successes. The larger your country, the more ignorant you are of the successes of other countries, reaching the Olympian majesty of the US, where the television networks focus on American athletes to the total exclusion of lesser breeds. We entered a vale of tears over the fate of a Sonia O'Sullivan, and fooled ourselves into thinking what had happened to her was an Olympic drama which moved the world it probably didn't even make it onto the American network.
Maybe Michelle Smith did, but only because she was walloping the Americans in a sport they expect to do well in. An Irish athlete winning gold in swimming is like the Nepalese winning the beach volleyball or a Canadian eskimo winning the high jump. Something going on here, guys.
Calling the Shots
The Americans expect success, and since their television networks largely subsidise the Games wherever they are held, they call the shots. So we get sports which nobody ever heard of until they became Olympic sports, such as formation swimming, which I only watched in the fond hope that I will see a swimmer (a) drown, or break wind. Possibly there are points for (b). Who knows?
Who cares? Where does formation swimming actually occur in life? I have never heard of anybody doing it is it like one of the those plants in the Botanic Gardens, which come to mysterious flower every four years, and have no intermediate existence?
And if women's softball and beach volleyball can be Olympic sports, why shouldn't there be Olympic medals to celebrate other aspects of American beach culture? Why are hot dog stands not allowed their own medals? Why is barbecuing not yet an Olympian event? The time must have come for hamburgers to be an Olympic contest, with a gold McMedal for the winner, who will certainly be an American.
Nobody was calling for oxygen when the basketball medal went to the only country in the world which has a full time professional league the shrewder of us suspected the Americans were in with a shout, and by. George, we were right, with the little fellows from Yemen no where to be seen. If we are going to have sports like basketball in the Olympics, should they not, rather like weight in boxing and weight lifting and judo, be categorised by height? Otherwise the plucky competitors from Peru will be waiting a long time indeed before they make it to the quarter finals.
Let us be frank. That freakish gene pool which is descended from African slave populations is available to only a few countries, the US most prominently. This gene pool confers the ability to destroy all competition up to 800 metres, and then zero, nothing, zilch, as they would say. There are no American Black runners at 1500 metres or more. East and North African, yes American, Canadian, West Indian, British none.
A Question of Race
Why? American baseball, basketball and football players are black but not the swimmers. Why? It is it not a question of facilities after all, a little red head from Rathcoole who had to practise her swimming in a birdbath, and was frequently found doing racing dives into the kitchen sink, got a hat full of swimming medals.
And why does nobody talk about this? Why does nobody ever discuss the certainty that all successful sprinters in all Olympics are descended from slaves who apparently couldn't swim? Is it because the ones who could swim dived overboard and went back to Africa? Am I heading into trouble here?
Probably. So why is race such a difficult thing to discuss? The most obvious thing about a person is his or her race yet commentators hardly ever identify an athlete by race, preferring to describe the colour of his/her socks or the parting in the hair or the absence or otherwise of spectacles the fact that he or she might be coal black in a field of faces pink as lung tissue normally escapes the commentators' attention. What matter. Four more years without the Olympics. Bliss.