Tears and cheers
FRANK KEATING
Public tears by the torrent gauge performance these days — at either end of the scale — and for a while yet 2004 will be lodged in British memories for both the heroic lakeside blub at relief of victory by he-man rower Matthew Pinsent and, on the same Athens weekend, the dolorous debouchment of anguish by pinkeyed distance runner Paula Radcliffe as she sprawled, all in, on the pavement by the side of the cruel and winding road from Marathon. Meanwhile, I suppose the universally acclaimed individual showstoppers for the all-time Olympics’ pantheon were the US swimmer Michael Phelps, six gold medals, and the double victories on the track by two former army sergeants, Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj in the men’s 1,500m and 5,000m, and Britain’s Kelly Holmes in the women’s 800m and 1,500m.
Britain won 28 medals, the same as four years previously at Sydney, and once again cycling, sailing and rowing provided by far the best return on investment. In all, Sport England and UK Sport spent more than £150 million on preparing the Olympic team — an average of nearly £500,000 per athlete of which, it has to be said, the vast majority were only there for the suntan. Is it a strength or a weakness to compete across such a wide variety of sports? Certainly, Brit athletics needs a new spring in its step. Perhaps we are not taking enough steroids. In all, in spite of their own local difficulties in that regard, Athens put on a Games of splendour, dispelling forecasts of gloom trumpeted by desperately snide and deriding British tabloids. When one of their Sunday number dispatched a thicko reporter to test security at Olympic venues by hiding a series of packages marked ‘Hello, I am a Bomb’, the wheeze was contemptuously dismissed by the Athens police chief: ‘Our dogs are not trained to read; they are trained to find bombs.’ The Greeks had come in on a high, their workaday football team having nobly won the European championship. What’s Greek for esprit de corps? This is what the pallid England team lacked when the going got tough. Yet again in a major competition England’s overpaid Swedish coach and ladies’ man could not rouse the remotest spark in his men when it mattered and, back home, the deluded St Georgians tore down their confetti of national flags and, with tedious predictability, blamed a foreign referee for a perfectly proper decision. At least England did provide, on the pitch anyway, one dazzling light of genuine resplendence at inside-forward — the ingenuous and inge nious, potato-faced, 17-year-old scouser Wayne Rooney — but when the prodigy limped away with a broken foot (‘oh, if only his right boot hadn’t collided with himself,’ wailed the man on Radio 5) his elders wandered about bereft, bumbling and, in no time, well beaten.
Meantime, the Times headline — ‘Henman a Winner as he Loses Again’ — once again told the annual tale of Britain’s midsummer mania. Wimbledon winner for the second year running was the astonishingly accomplished Swiss Roger Federer. Might he be not only the most beautiful to watch but, already, simply the very best who has ever played the old game? Golly, better than smiling Lew, or Rod the rocket; better than John Mac or Sampras? Wow! At cricket, the Australians swaggered serenely towards the promise of a ravishing 2005 Ashes challenge, for which England should take the field with a confidence built around the versatile and thrillingly unrestrained vigour of red-rose gingernut Andrew Flintoff. And while Europe’s golfers won the Ryder Cup handsomely, at rugby England’s lauded World Cup winners of 12 months ago disintegrated at once with retirements and injuries, and its newly knighted coach Clive Woodward stepped down saying that, on second thoughts, he’d always preferred soccer anyway. He did agree, as a last throw with the oval ball, to take the combined British Isles’ Lions to New Zealand in 2005, for whose 40 players Sir Clive at once named a preposterous 29 back-up managementand-coaching staff (the only Lions ever to win there, in 1971, took just two) and when that list included as chief media-mandarin a certain Alastair Campbell of Burnley, well, all rugby knew that their wacky Woody was truly taking the piss.
The Spec’s own Peter Oborne deservedly won the Sportsbook of the Year award with his even-handed incrimination of the cricket establishment’s part in the 1968 D’Oliveira Affair. A sporting biog with knobs on, to be sure. I enjoyed a handful of other biographies, not necessarily the usual overblown, underwritten, ghosted suspects peddled and overplugged by the big publishers. For instance, Nasser Hussain’s glum, charmless and angry ghosted ‘bestseller’ might have been a fair portrait of its pouting subject, but as a worthwhile read it was not a patch on the illuminatingly fresh, witty and wholly diverting life of a fellow county cricket captain (and two-cap wonder) which the cultivated Steve James wrote himself. Likewise for foot-lit: Grahame Lloyd’s touching, tortured life of Terry Yorath or Leo Moynihan’s compellingly rewarding study of spiky Gordon Strachan were each worth 10 volumes of the ghosted tripe dished up in the first-person name of David Beckham. As always, I confess enjoyment of non-sporting biogs which, of a sudden, jump out with a surreal sporting reference. Like The Smoking Diaries when playwright Simon Gray, at 65, endearingly nominates one of his three best memories his schoolboy’s ‘late cut off a high-speed ball not that far outside my off-stump that went skidding to the boundary, a perfectly executed shot that was entirely reflex ... a wondrous moment, the sensation of it, it tingles down my arms as I write.’ Other thesps’ thoughts as well — for instance, in Frank Skinner’s autobiog, page-turner and ripe Rabelaisian tour de force, the comedian recalls watching boxing on the telly with his dear old dad: ‘He threw every punch and sat bobbing and weaving on the sofa till the fight was over. I once grabbed a towel and started fanning him between rounds.’ Or in his rich, rousing rant of a (mostly) resting actor’s memoir, Michael Simkins evocatively manages to touch one’s own ageing, too-fast-fading memory store of youthful summers long gone, as he embarks on yet another irresistibly racy yarn: ‘A friend had hired a private box for the Lord’s Test and I’ve spent the day drinking champagne and watching the cricket, and while I’m there I’m introduced to Rafaella, who is half Italian and stunning... ’.
Ah yes, I remember it well ... those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.... But now, I suppose, they have — an admission of wistful catharsis unquestionably worth a raging cascade of sporting tears.
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