SPECTATOR SPORT

A week full of joys

Simon Barnes

TO pursue the trade of sports hack requires a gradual acquisition of perspec- tive, along with a retention of the capacity to be amazed. It is a balancing act: you must be like a female gymnast and perform your pirouettes on a four-inch-wide beam, forever wary of tumbling into elaborate cynicism on one side or blind hero-making on the other.

All this counts double if you are covering the Olympic Games for a daily newspaper, and double again if the event is as woefully organised as the Atlanta Games were this summer. The tendency is to form self-pity- ing groups at the bar: What are we all here for? What is the point of this terrible exis- tence? The flight home increasingly seems an Arcadian prospect, the only thing capa- ble of bringing back good to a troubled world.

Those who live the religious life speak of the conversion experience, a spiritual renewal, a struggle from which one emerges still deeper in faith. If such a thing can be said about so trivial a matter as sport, I certainly experienced some kind of renewal in the humid streets and arid xeno- phobia of the Atlanta Games.

Did you know that you can judge diving with your eyes shut? You don't really need to see the turns and tumbles the divers per- form on the way down; they can all do them brilliantly. The difference is in spatial understanding: the best enter the water not like a log but an arrow.

The women's springboard competition was tightly bunched; the fourth round was decisive. Competitor after competitor made a fractional error of judgment. You could hear it: ker-splash, ker-splash. And then a girl with the eyes of a basilisk. Chomp! No drawn-out plashing, a laconic, monosyllabic rip. And Fu Mingxia had her second gold medal of the Games, to go with the gold she won in Barcelona four years ago — and she but 17.

Perfection, grace, courage and stone-cold nerve. It was a powerful and moving moment. And it was part of a week filled with rich moments; as they unfolded before me, all possibility of weariness of sport seemed set aside forever. Sport, and its ancillary disciplines like writing, were no longer the futile things they seem some- times: the toy department of the daily paper, the pursuit despised by intellectuals, the self-gratifying plaything of politicians, the delight of despots, the joy of the xeno- phobes and jingoists.

Fu, being Chinese, is a tool of an auto- cratic government prepared (like all other governments) to use sport for international prestige. Try telling that to her. She wants victory, she seeks perfection, and she would dive in pursuit of these things if she were a pauper, a millionaire, a slave or a queen. It is in her nature. To see her unwavering eyes on the board is to understand all that. If 'she knows fear and doubts, she conquers them. And she dives so close to the board that she regularly flicks its edge with her forelock.

It was a week full of joys, of repeated lift- ing of the heart. It seemed that the naive amazement of the boy and an age of watch- ing and writing about all kinds of sports were conjoined in a new delight. Perhaps it was getting that novel written at last, a feel- ing that, if I could hold my head up as a soon-to-be-published novelist, I could set aside reservations about sport and the writ- ing of it.

The week began with the bomb at the open-air party: a bang across the Atlanta night that woke a city, killed one, injured dozens and terrified millions. The following day, I watched Donovan Bailey win the 100 metres. The Olympic 100 metres final is always and invariably the single greatest sporting event of any four-year period. Bai- ley's blast of power and speed, exploding from halfway unstoppably, almost out of control, was a kind of madness, and a deeper 'Hang on, lads, I think we're following the wrong star.' kind of sanity. The true insanity lay outside — in the world of bombs and politicking.

Monday brought me to the men's high- bar gymnastics and the joy of the first ever piked kovacs performed in competition. It was the masterpiece of a young Russian named Alexei Nemov. A kovacs is the most dramatic move in gymnastics. You let go of the bar, turn a somersault high above it, and then reach out a nonchalant hand or two to grab the bar again en passant. To perform the move piked — that is, with straight legs and hands touching toes — is infinitely more difficult, dangerous and lovely. Nemov was given the bronze: foolish mark, but that is the way of things in the arbitrarily marked events.

The next day brought me, in exquisite contrast, to the domain of the strutting, beer-bellied giants of the super-heavy- weight weight-lifting competition, from arbitrary marks to the brutal logic of strength. There is no aesthetic of weight- lifting. Brute force is the beginning, middle and end of it, and it is utterly compelling. Ronny Weller set a new world record, beat- ing the old one by 2.5kg. But on came Andrei Chemerlcin of Russia, and raised the weight by five kilos, and with it the hearts of his audience. Gravity had been conquered yet again.

After Fu on Wednesday, I was back at the athletic track on Thursday, this time to see Michael Johnson, the man with the golden shoes, the man who runs like Grou- cho Marx chasing a waitress, set a new world record in the 200 metres. It was one of the most extraordinary sporting feats I, and the world, have ever witnessed.

And talk of lifting the heart: all of us British press people were on our feet, wag- ging our heads in amazement and exchang- ing watermelon grins. This included Colin Hart of the Sun, beaming at me like Apol- lo. I had always thought he hated me for a philosophical disagreement about boxing. (Not true,' my colleague John Goodbody insisted. 'Colin doesn't hate you, he despises you.') But he, transfigured by the joy of Johnson, by the pure, distilled perfection that sport can bring, set all such things aside. 'F—ing wonderful,' he said to me in the warmth of shared delight, and he was right.

There was a final joy remaining, a dawn raid to the equestrian park to watch the dressage and a glorious performance from a horse called Bonfire that didn't touch the ground once. Silver medal only, but the horse at least won from me my own rendi- tion of the Colin Hart accolade. Indeed, those two words, torn from the heart of Hart, summed up that week, and with it the whole point of sport. Sport may be non- sense, it may be unutterably trivial, but nothing that lifts the spirit (and makes ColM Hart smile at me) can be altogether valueless.