This week, the country was gripped by a sporting competition, by which I mean that we competed with each other to demonstrate how totally uninterested we were in the Winter Olympics - the games we’ll never hold in this country unless by global warming they mean global cooling. The television broadcasters are, however, very interested indeed and dispatched their top teams to cover the event. The BBC sent an army of people and equipment large enough to re-take Hong Kong. Eurosport flew out two blokes who packed their own sandwiches and Sky Sports didn’t bother at all as they have the rights to the World Series of Poker.
With great expectation I tuned to the Beeb in hope of seeing some luminous nutters in crash helmets throwing themselves down a mountain at a faster rate then you are allowed on the M25 but they seemed to be staging a talk show with scenery in which an unfunny Scottish woman was offering endless dud witticisms that fell from her lips and died before reaching us, so I tuned to Eurosport to see a collection of shaggy haired, surfer dudes strapped to snowboards, hurling themselves around a slope while listening to Megadeath on their iPods, with their bottoms hanging out. It’s the only Olympic discipline where the competitors hobble themselves by wearing their waistbands round their knees. Most of them looked as though they practised between bong hits. It was like Cheech and Chong go to the Olympics.
Each competitor was almost invisible beneath an outsize assemblage of colourful nylon, like a pile of folded tents. A successfully completed run was met with “Yeahs” and “Wows” and “Whoas” - that would have pleased the founder of the games, Pierre de Coubertin who’s motto was “winning is not important in the event, it’s the getting stoned afterwards”. I may have that wrong. To check, I tuned to the BBC but they were still talking, this time to a British politician at the Games, proving that despite everything that’s happened, there’s still a lot of life yet on the first class, five star expenses circuit. All in the name of research of course.
Over on Eurosport, they seemed to be filming my Christmas decorations which turned out to be the men’s ice dancing competition. The attending skaters had raided Elton John’s dressing up box, had all the outfits taken in and camped up. A lot. There were spangles and sequins, and feathers and epaulettes and peek-a-boo slashes and body stockings and enough hairspray to style a corn field. It was a gliding display of sparkly vacuum packed leotards that looked at first glance to be a gay superhero’s convention. They wouldn’t beat up a ne’er-do-well, they’d bedazzle them. With jazz hands. They waved their arms about so much it was like their fingers were on fire and they were trying to flap them out. It was the single most ludicrous display of catastrophic dress sense failure since Posh Spice got a credit card. Only one man looked as tough he could swap his shoes and walk among us without comment, but then only if he was going clubbing.
Meanwhile over on the BBC they were STILL TALKING, so I tuned back to Eurosport where a woman in a six foot condom and a motorcycle helmet, like a giant human lollipop, rode a tea tray down a track so fast she’d get an ASBO if she’d tried it here. Over there they gave her a gold medal.
And through it all, there appeared to be the one thing that seems lacking in the real Olympics - a sense of fun. The competitors appeared to be enjoying themselves whether they won or not. The crowd, beers in hands, were visibly loving it. The oppressive corporate sponsorship of the summer games seemed absent, or at least less obvious and you got the felling that if the games weren’t on, they’d be going down the moguls for the hell of it. So I salute you Winter Olympians. You may all be professional millionaires but a least it didn’t look like it. In place of the summer games hatchet faced seriousness was that rare thing in competitive sports - a smile, or in the case of the snow boarders, a goofy, lopsided red-eyed grin.