Medal-winning brilliance requires obsession as well as dedication and skill. I can’t help wondering what these athletes’ bodies and minds have gone through over the years, writes Guardian columnist Adrian Chiles
Medal-winning brilliance requires obsession as well as dedication and skill. I can’t help wondering what these athletes’ bodies and minds have gone through over the yearss sport good for you? I’m beginning to wonder. Ahead of the Olympics I spoke to Andy Hodge, one of our greatest rowers. He told me how, plagued by injury and illness, he battled to get to his third Games, in Rio.
We often talk about the power of the Olympics to encourage kids to take up sport, which is great. But there’s a slight dissonance here. Do we really want them to engage in it as obsessively as those whose brilliance and dedication we so admire? The breaking of Hodge’s body was never far from my mind when it came to broadcasting the rowing contests from Paris. Watching the GB pair Tom George and Oliver Wynne-Griffith lead their whole race only to be pipped at the line, a new thought occurred to me: never mind what this is doing to the athletes’ bodies; I’m beginning to wonder if it’s doing us spectators any good either. The stress is real, and relentless, especially at Olympics time.
And the stress comes thick and fast at us poor spectators, about sports indoors and outdoors, in water and on water, throwing things, catching things, hitting things, winning things, losing things. Sports you barely understand because you only take any interest in them once every four years. Sports you can’t believe anyone’s been cruel enough to think up. Synchronised diving, for example.
One minute we’re choking up at the sight of a distressed Chinese girl who has just bounced clean off her trampoline, the next we’re bouncing off the ceiling at the joy of GB’s Bryony Page. I drove my mum somewhere to give us both a break from it all, but we ended up listening on Croatian radio to commentary of Croatia v Greece in the water polo – a sport the rules of which neither of us are familiar with, yet we ended up stuck on the M1 cursing the refereeing decisions as much as the traffic.
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