Narcolepts' nirvana
Simon Barnes
THE most boring thing about the Winter Olympics — and there is a fair old choice — is the way people keep telling you they are boring. Of course they're boring; they're supposed to be boring. The second most boring thing is the way people — all of them on television — keep telling you that they are not boring at all, but very, very exciting. Of course they're not exciting; they're deadly dull. Once you have cracked that, you can start to enjoy them.
The third most boring thing is the way people go on and on about the winter games as if they represented a kind of national failure. Brits are not supposed to be good at winter sports. It's not cold enough here, and the mountains are not high enough. The Gulf Stream has robbed us for ever of our chances of topping the medal table in winter sports; God bless the Gulf Stream.
Winter sports are for Austrians and Norwegians and Russian skaters; but we need not feel a flush of national shame because we cannot recognise a Protopopov Death Spiral, or find a couple to perform one in the Olympic arena. The fact that Lesley McKenna failed to qualify for the final of the snow-boarding half-pipe does not make me feel that Britain is all washed up.
The fourth most boring thing about the Winter Olympics is that people keep saying that they don't really understand the sports. Of course they don't; they are completely incomprehensible. They are not part of our culture; we shouldn't expect to understand them. It's like reading the Bhagavad Gita and expecting it to be like Lucky Jim.
The point is to revel in the incomprehensibility, the exoticism, the fact that what seems like nonsense is to others the breath of life. Take speed-skating, perhaps the most boring sport of them all: two people dressed in condoms, apparently racing each other on a pair of knife-blades, but they're not actually racing at all, they just happen to be on the ice at the same time. These people have dedicated their entire lives to condom-wearing and knife-sliding; this is the most important moment in their entire existence, and somewhere in the world — probably Holland — there are people praying for them.
This is terribly interesting, if dull. This is sport we can watch without the burden of patriotism, partisanship, or comprehension. We can sit back, aloof, paring our fingernails, watching the trials and the follies and the triumphs of humankind, savouring a moment of quiet grace or a second or two of muted drama before pouring another drink.
This is the grown-up way to look at sport: we don't care who wins, we know in our hearts that it is all extremely silly, and that it doesn't matter a jot who slithers faster or more artistically than some other foreigner.
This is sport without character, sport without narrative, sport without drama. Billy Liar fantasises his ideal parents, with a mother called Simone who says things like, 'How dreary, Billy's pissed again.' The Winter Olympics are the same sort of thing: how dreary, someone's broken a world record; how dull, some impossible upset has taken place in the skiing; how frightfully enervating, there's a major rumpus at the skating. In many ways, that is the ideal way to look at sport: remote, tolerant, a smile of faint amusement occasionally flickering across our faces — Lord, what fools these mortals be! I think I'll have another whisky.
Previous page
