As per Wingnut’s suggestion, the opening statement remains true;

Citius, Altius, Fortius

A festival of sports you’d not normally be bothered by…..

That said, there are some quite good events on offer.

And some absolutely bollocks ones.

Yet they all give a not quite gold medal away at the end of every event as if they are all equally impressive endeavours.

Let’s think about that for a moment; in the Olympic world Usain Bolt’s incredible sprint achievements are ranked in the same range of human endurance as the winner of an air rifle event.

Pottering about in a dinghy for half an hour is somehow the sporting equal of the incredibly demanding and highly technical discipline of women’s beach volleyball.

Greco-Roman wrestling, a sport so homo-erotic that it has spawned an entire genre of jokes in crap American teen movies, is equivalent to running a sub-125 minute marathon. Oh, speaking of which, last nights commentary team for the women’s marathon included Eddie McGuire, a man who couldn’t run a bath, let alone 26 miles. Quelle irony.

It just doesn’t make natural sense, does it? Especially in the context that in their individual events, winner takes all. This isn’t like some pathetic school sports day run by a left-wing headmistress with a fading CND badge and hairy armpits, shouting to the kids, “you’re ALL winners” while handing out medals to every kid, slim or fat, as they waddled over the line.

No, in an Olympic event, you win or lose, there’s no halfway, no cigar for being close. Winners are fucking grinners.

Except the bloke who wins at ping pong, a sport really only played at church-organised youth clubs, gets the same bloody medal as the stringy 1,500m runner who runs each lap at a pace you and I could barely manage on a cycle.

This needs to stop NOW.

What to do?

Clearly there needs to be a grading system in place whereby an important sport is recognised above a wanky one. When I mentioned this idea to a colleague today, she suggested that the commercial reward the athletes get is commensurate to the gravitas of their sport. I disagree; the money and the sponsorship deals flow to the very high profile sports only.

A simple grading system would kill the elephant in the room; that is that a country’s haul of, say 16 gold medals, matters less than which gold medals they are.

I’m conscious that this might be at odds to the current “Team GB” performance but, frankly, it might give the whole rolling corporate charabang and industry that is the modern Olympics just a teeny bit of credibility with us fans of, how to put this delicately…. sports.

Right, time to go; there’s a “canoe sprint” heat to be watched. This seems to be a kneeling one paddle race…. No, I didn’t know either.

And according to the Australian media, the enemy’s name is “Team GB”.

After 8 days of competition, reality has rudely penetrated the minds of the grammatically-challenged and geography-illiterate Australian press and commentary teams. It’s become painfully obvious to even the most neanderthal flag-wearing bogan with yellow and green face paint chanting “Aussie Aussie Aussie, oi oi oi” (hint: ask the Barmy Army how to do chants) that this is going to be an Olympics to forget.

Foxtel interviewed Kitty Chiller, Team Australia’s Deputy Chef de Mission, yesterday and delicately asked what the fucking fuck had gone the fuck wrong for fuck’s sake, you fucker?

Kitty stressed during the interview that “it’s too early to start the post mortem”…… Which means it’s probably time to start the post mortem then, and that’s exactly what’s happening.

She went on to suggest that Australia might come good in the (cough, splutter) BMX and then tried to play the “sport is the winner, let’s be good sports” card; she suggested that, in the absence of anything homegrown to cheer, we should “celebrate the performances of other nations”, and then sotto voce, “except the UK”.

Ho ho ho, how funny you are Kitty. Perhaps don’t book yourself onto the open mic night of the Comedy Store just yet though, eh? And Australia learning to be good losers has to be one of the most optimistic aspirations since I last SMS’d Halle Berry to let her know that Charlie was out of town for the evening.

But this is the theme now in the Australian media. It’s apparent there’s not much joy imminent for Australian athletes so the new plan is to cheer for anyone other than GB.

Every other article in the Sydney Morning Herald (a “news”paper with troubles of its own, not least because most of its advertising revenue is dependent on a buoyant property market….doh!) describes the crowds in London as “one-eyed”. Presumably their readers would have had to have looked up “partisan”. But who exactly did they expect a home crowd to cheer for?

But more insidious is the Foxtel commentary; many of the commentators are now openly bagging the GB competitor in events and cheering whoever is the next in running for gold, regardless of who or where they are from.

We listened with open jaws last night as petulant microphone jockeys slated the British athletes in most disciplines. The first GB gold went to a pair of British rowers who had been selected for the sport three years previously based on body type and VO2 Max capability. This was seized upon by some of the commentary team as somehow diminishing their world beating effort. Similarly, the way the British Olympic Committee had allocated funds to athletes identified as likely to achieve greatness rather than just making up the numbers in the field was suggested as being cynical and unsportsmanlike.

Hang on just a minute…. This is Australia making these complaints? The people who bowl underarm to win a meaningless one day cricket match? The country that invented the art of insulting opposition batsmen to put them off their game? The same country that gave away thousands of yellow scarves at an international rugby match to counteract the travelling support of the opposition?

The very same.

We know exactly what to expect at the next Olympics of course; a faithful aping of exactly the tactics they are so sniffy about this year.

In the meantime, let’s sit back with a big bowl of popcorn and watch the soul-searching Olympics start about 2 international flights after the closing ceremony.

As I’ve stated previously here, I don’t really give a stuff about the Olympics, hence leaving a perfectly-positioned apartment in The People’s Socialist Republic of Islington 2 years ago for the Sydney City Communist Commune.

In fact, unlike the rest of the world, we missed the opening ceremony this morning in order to get an early start on ticking off the 8 hours on the road back home from the skiing holiday.

This presented us with a ideal opportunity to gauge the Australian reaction to Danny Boyle’s (the pipes, the pipes are calling) 3 hour production of the London2012 opening ceremony.

And what was the general consensus?

Grudging respect.

I’m looking forward to reading how my mirror image, Vegemite Wife, will call it tomorrow in her category, Failympics.

Her countrymen and women on various regional and national radio stations (you get a lot of opportunity to scan the dials on an 8 hour drive) were extremely complimentary, using adjectives (for my Australian readers; yes, that’s the name for words that describe things) including “playful” and “self-deprecating” with much emphasis on the quality of the musical content, potted history of the British Isles and the quirky British humour.

All of which brought a patriotic tear to my eye somewhere around the Wagga Wagga turning.

Until….. someone mentioned that the Mr. Bean elements were hilarious.

Oh fuck. Mr. fucking Bean?

Is Rowan Atkinson still alive and capable of embarrassing intelligent Englishmen by supposedly representing us on the world stage? Thank Christ Benny Hill is no longer with us.

I’d really hoped he’d been filed in the same category of “where the fuck are they now?” as Phil Collins and Dido (my personal theory about her is that she finally got over THAT boyfriend who dumped her and completely lost the ability to write whiny songs about him).

Anyway, back to the Aussie take on the Olympic moneybomb that is the West End musical dropped into a football stadium. I only heard two criticisms; that Her Maj looked bored (more likely anxious; no-one with any sense should be in Stratford after dark) and that Sir Paul McCartney is getting on a bit nowadays.

I have some sympathy with this 2nd point, but from a different angle. Namely, he’s the 2nd least talented Beatle. Ok, he’s the most talented living Beatle but if George and John were still with us he’d be relegated to narrating children’s TV shows about trains with Starkers.

Apparently, early in Jonathan (w)Ross’s career, he interviewed Paul and was this close to asking him, “how does it feel being the world’s least favourite Beatle?”.

Shame he bottled it.

See you in a couple weeks to discuss the medals per capita coverage in the Australian media as they come to terms with a poor performance…

The London 2012 Olympics are approaching rapidly. We know this because much of the TV schedule is increasingly peppered with little vignettes showing previous Aussie gold medal performances and interviews with Olympians reliving the moment. I’ve already stated an ambivalence to most things Olympic; it’s just not my cup of sporting tea and the whole circus seems to be highly diluted by the vast range of categories and sports included in the schedule. I mean seriously, I like sailing but do we really need 10 separate categories to tease out who is the best sailor in the world?

Looking at the list of current events, one does wonder where synchronised swimming and beach volleyball sit in the “Citius, Altius, Fortius” motto, as pleasing on the eye as they may be?

But what will excite me about this year’s Olympics is how the medal totals build up over the two and a half weeks. There is a great opportunity to observe a traditional rivalry and some deep-rooted national insecurities as Great Britain and Australia battle it out for 4th place.

Already, the hubris is developed and very public. The Sydders Morning Herald has been slowly piling the pressure on the travelling athletes with this article the latest in the battle to raise national expectations. Four years ago, Australia had a rude awakening in Beijing when the old rival snuck in front of the not-so-lucky country to take the prestigious spot on the podium after the USA, China and Russia, leaving Australia languishing down in lowly 6th. Ok, 4th isn’t strictly a podium placing but the point is that Australian demand that their athletes out-perform the motherland even if the superpowers are out of reach.

Fox Sports is currently running an advert for their coverage (I tried to find an online version to link to, but failed, sorry) where there’s a brief soundbite from one Australian Olympic akidoo stating, rather sniffily, that “Great Britain has tried their hardest to poach all of the best Australian coaches”. Which surely must be the 2nd best candidate for the reason to be wheeled out if the Australian team fail to beat the old country in August. Long term veteran observers of the Olympics and Commonwealth Games will know that the prime response to a poor showing on the medal table is to illustrate the medal table in terms of medals per capita of the population. It’s a sure fire indicator of a crap Australian performance when the per capita comparison is used.

Of course, I may well not make it all the way through the festival of sport without having to replace my TV; it’s highly probably that there will be a coffee cup flying through the supersized LCD bogan-pacifier at the first use of the noun “medal” as a verb, as in “Kylie Smith-Lavazza (of the “Smith-Lavazzas” of Surrey, presumably?) has just medalled in the asynchronous wind-surfing event”.