Attention, football! My love for you is not conditional on you “learning” from the Olympics. In fact, it’s not conditional. Honestly, darling, you’re like a child to me in that way. I will love you whatever – even when you’re naughty, even when I’m cross, even when it sounds like I’m really disappointed in you. (It might feel confusing at the time, but in some ways those are the moments I love you the most.) In fact, I will love you even if it all gets a bit We Need To Talk About Football. I’ll still come and visit you in whatever maximum-security place they’re keeping you, after whatever horrendous thing it is you’ve done.
Alas, we are at that point in the Olympics cycle when the misty-eyed traditionally explain what the dreadful footballers could learn from the morally superior Olympians. Clearly, it would be slightly obnoxious at this stage to counter by rolling a piece of paper into the old typewriter and bashing out the headline WHAT THE OLYMPICS COULD LEARN FROM THE LOVELY PREMIER LEAGUE. Anyway, I for one enjoy all the lectures from people who like Olympic sports and athletes almost – but not quite – enough to watch them more than once every four years. But it does make me a little sad that they seem to have missed the times when the Premier League really tried to tack hard toward Olympic disciplines – for instance, when wannabe biathlete Ashley Cole came off the training pitch at Chelsea’s Cobham training ground and shot a work experience student.
Comparing the Olympics with football is to compare something with the gestation of a novel to something that happens continuously for 10 months of the year or more. Furthermore, Olympic events are often deemed so recherché that the sport itself is merely one moment in a heavily promoted backstory. For this televisual playbook, we owe much to dear old Simon Cowell. It was the Karaoke Sauron, of course, who apotheosized the packaged “journey” of any competitor, and his relentless focus on the backstory has bled across all broadcasting.
You can no longer have a lot of sport without it. The training montage frequently seems as important as the event itself. I am not sure the logical destination of all this is anywhere particularly aspirational. Consider NBC, who are so patronisingly obsessed with the idea of context that they didn’t even show Rio’s opening ceremony live. They wanted to “curate” it. As their top sports executive explained: “We think it’s important that we are able to put [it] in context for the viewer so that it’s not just a flash of colour.”
There must and shall be takeout. And yet, I find myself rather against the idea that all of modern life must, in some way, teach us about some other aspect of modern life. When Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld were making Seinfeld, they shied away from this cosy didacticism that had historically characterised so many other American sitcoms. Their mantra was “No hugging, no learning”, and they were so insistent upon it that they even had jackets bearing the motto made up for staff.
These days, fewer and fewer sporting moments are permitted not to be a learning experience, as though enjoying them purely sportingly, and for their own sake, would be a waste of time or a lesser experience. There must be hugging. There must be learning. Post‑event interviewers are always effectively asking the person who has provided the sporting moment what we’ve learned from it. We get the long view while the athlete is still out of breath. And we do that particularly as far as the Olympics is concerned, because the reality is a) the sports are often deeply niche and b) no one is going to be sticking around for the next three years and 49 weeks.
Football is largely immune from this. Perhaps there is just so much football, and it is so stratospherically popular – how appalling! – that people don’t feel apparently morally and dutifully bound to take some lesson from it every time they see it. What a relief. I love the Olympics, but that’s quite enough hugging and learning for now.
Botham’s Ashes and a bygone Britishness
Is there anything more nationally uplifting than out-of-shape politicians piggybacking on the success of Olympic athletes who totally disagree with them? The only possible answer is hardline Republicans rocking out to Born in the USA, as though its transparently despairing lyrics were as impenetrable as their wives.
It began even before the athletes were home from Rio. Last week (and to the fury of Team GB) it was the turn of British Olympic gold medal winners to be co-opted by people whose idea of a training regime is a full English and some light bigotry. Leave.EU – the provisional wing of the Brexit campaign – released a video featuring pictures of all the British Olympic gold medal winners up to that moment, interspersed with text reading “We’re too small …” and “We need to be in the EU …” They were being ironic, of course, with all of the gossamer touch we came to expect during the referendum campaign itself. The only sadness was that they hadn’t thought of this a few hours earlier, then they wouldn’t have had to include Mo Farah’s first gold, and their video would have looked exactly the way they seem to like things.
I say this advisedly. On the very last morning of the referendum campaign itself, I saw Nigel Farage take to a stage in Westminster for his final address, which began with a Leave.EU film about Britain narrated by his good self.
In this, he quavered that Britain was “a country of sporting greatness”. Quite right – and yet, the only footage used to illustrate this was of Botham’s Ashes. Botham’s Ashes! I mean really … what could be more au courant than Botham’s Ashes? I hardly need remind you of the date of that undoubted triumph, but it did seem remarkable that nothing in the intervening three and a half decades of British sporting success was worthy of inclusion instead.
Indeed, it made me wonder: what is it about so many of the sporting triumphs of the past 35 years that makes them somehow unsuitable for a Leave.EU video? You might have thought, say, that Super Saturday during the London Games might have provided a moment of total sporting Britishness. Then again, to the likes of Leave.EU, it didn’t seem to. I leave it to you to speculate as to why.
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