I’ve had a bit of a break from blogging for the last few months following the birth of our son. Time is now a very precious commodity and I don’t have enough of it to spend on blogging. Which is a shame, because it’s precisely at times like this that this blog could be a useful way of letting friends and family keep up to date with our news. With a new year about to begin, I might think about giving the blog a bit of a “reboot” (seems to be the thing to do with everything these days) and get back into the habit of updating it regularly.
In the meantime, I spent a lovely evening with a group of friends from church last night and this song got mentioned. I had a sudden urge to hear it and see the video, so here it is:
Most of the Olympic memories that I’ve written about in this series have been of people winning medals, mostly gold. For my final memory, I am going to write about someone who has never won an Olympic medal throughout her otherwise illustrious sporting career: Paula Radcliffe.
In 2000, my dad and I had followed the final of the women’s 10,000m on the radio as we travelled from our home in Kilbirnie to Largs for a school band practice. Paula had set a fierce pace in the hope of tiring the rest of the field. One by one, her opponents dropped away from the leading group as they struggled to keep up. All except three, who sprinted past her in the closing stages to leave Paula empty-handed and broken-hearted.
Following this disappointment, she began to focus on road running, winning a number of high-profile events including the Chicago and London Marathons and setting a number of world records. Come the Athens Olympics in 2004, the British media had practically hung the gold medal round her neck and were viewing the marathon almost as a victory parade for “our Paula”. Struggling against injury, illness and the weather conditions, she pulled out of the race with a few miles remaining. The image of Paula sitting on a kerb by the side of the road weeping became one of the defining images of the games.
Five days later, my dad and I were making another, longer car journey. We were on our way to Braemar for a two-day hike to Aviemore and back. As we listened to the radio, there was a lot of debate about Paula, who had by now made a late entry into the 10,000m. Had she put her health at risk by starting the marathon? Had she shown a lack of pride and determination by dropping out? Was she foolishly risking her reputation by running the 10,000m? Nobody knew the answers, but it didn’t stop them from phoning in to add their tuppence-worth.
After checking into our hotel, we got a pint from the bar (well – one each obviously) and headed to our room to watch the race. We knew that realistically it was asking a lot for Paula to finish the race, never mind coming close to a medal, but the idea that she could make a miraculous come-back was irresistible. She was the European and Commonwealth champion at this distance, after all. Surely she had some kind of chance?
Initially, things looked promising. She stayed in touch with leaders; her head was rocking from side to side, but with Paula – that’s a good sign. Then, with eight laps left, the inevitable happened: she stepped off the track and her Olympic dream was finally extinguished.
For another four years, anyway. This year in Beijing, Paula Radcliffe is again entered in the marathon in what is probably her last chance to win gold. Again though, her preparations have not been ideal. In April, she had to withdraw from the London Marathon because of injury. Recovery was not as rapid as expected, and only when the British team set off for China last month was it confirmed that she intended to compete.
Can she finally win Olympic gold on 17th August? Let’s hope so.
And so to the year 2000 – the first year of the new century. Or the last year of the old century, depending on how you look at it. More importantly for me, it was the first year that I had a proper job. This was a new interruption to my Olympic viewing, but I managed to work round it.
At the start of the games, I was in Uxbridge for the induction week of my new job. Every morning, I would try watch as much of the live action as I could before leaving my B&B. In the evening, I would rush home to catch up on the day’s highlights. The following week, I was back in Glasgow with some self-paced training to keep me occupied. This meant that I was able to work from home, with the opportunity to sneak off to the TV whenever a key event was about to take place.
One particular final that I remember switching on for was the super heavyweight boxing. I have to confess that boxing is something of a guilty pleasure of mine. When I think about it rationally, the idea of getting pleasure from watching two men trying to inflict minor brain damage on each other is quite disturbing, but there is something quite enthralling about a competitive fight. To an extent, amateur boxing (which features in the Olympics) takes some of the danger and guilt away with its head-guards and point-scoring system.
So it was that I was caught up in the excitement as Audley Harrison progressed through the rounds. He was a charismatic character with a larger-than-life personality (which no mean feat considering a life-sized Audley Harrison is 6′5″ and over 17 stones). In the final, his opponent from Kazakhstan was no match and Harrison won Britain’s first boxing gold in the top weight division since 1920. Since turning professional, his career has not reached the heights expected of him, but for that moment he was a national hero.
The interesting thing about writing this series of blog entries is that, as the year in question gets closer, I can remember more about what happened in the games, but it becomes harder to isolate one stand-out moment. The Atlanta Olympics in 1996 are a prime example. I was at home, in the middle of summer holiday from university, with no job; I was able to watch almost the whole of the BBC’s coverage of the event. As a result, I can remember lots of things about it without a single “I’ll always remember where I was when…” moment.
Which makes writing this blog a bit tricky.
So here are my many highlights of 1996: Donovan Bailey breaking the 100m world record; Michael Johnson absolutely obliterating the record in the 200m and then going on the win the 400m; Jonathan Edwards missing out on triple jump gold after putting a toe over the take-off board; Steve Backley and Jan Železný in an epic javelin battle; Michelle Smith dominating in the swimming pool, but sparking drug allegations; Nwanko Kanu lighting up the football competition; Steve Redgrave winning a record fourth gold and swearing that he never wanted to get back in a boat again.
Barcelona – Such a beautiful horizon
Barcelona – Like a jewel in the sun
So sang Freddie Mercury in the words of the song that he wrote as the theme for the 1992 Olympics, but tragically never got to perform at the event itself. I can’t vouch for the veracity of those lyrics, having never visited the city, but I do have some great memories of the Barcelona games.
For the first week or so, I was in France with my family visiting my aunt and uncle who gone to stay there earlier that year. We spent a lot of time in front of TV together watching events in Spain, and there were many highlights: the Olympic flame being lit by a flaming arrow; Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan et al in the Dream Team; Steve Redgrave winning his third consecutive gold medal; Derek Redmond finishing his 400m semi-final with the help of his dad after tearing his hamstring.
One night of athletics stays in the memory. Both families had travelled over the border into Switzerland to visit another Scottish couple who were working there. It was 1st August – Swiss National Day – and the plan was to have dinner and then visit a local fireworks display, but we took time out to switch on the telly and watch the final of the men’s 100m. Linford Christie, at the age of 32, won the gold medal for Britain in a moment that will live long in mind.
As I am writing this however, I recall that there was another memorable final that evening. In the women’s 100m hurdles, Gail Devers was favourite. She had already caused an upset by winning the flat sprint and had the recorded fastest time in the heats of her stronger event. As the race got underway, Devers stretched away from the rest of the field and seemed certain to win her second gold, but hit the final hurdle hard. She tumbled to the ground, staggering over the line in fifth place.
The time difference between Britain and South Korea made it difficult to follow the 1988 Olympics live on TV. When my dad and my sister decided to get up early in the morning to watch the final of the men’s 100m sprint, I preferred to stay in bed. “You missed out”, they told me. “It was one of the most amazing sporting achievements ever seen. We wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” Ben Johnson had beaten a world class field, including the great Carl Lewis, by a clear distance: smashing his own world record. Days later, it was revealed that Johnson had been using steroids, shattering the illusions of my family along with millions of others.
The following week, I got up early on my own to watch the women’s 200m final. On this occasion, Florence Griffith-Joyner was the winner. Again, the margin of victory was emphatic; again, a world record was broken. But Flo Jo never failed a drugs test, so I had the satisfaction of knowing that I watched the result of human endeavours unaided by pharmaceutics, right? Well, maybe. The sudden improvement in her performances (setting records that are almost unchallenged 20 years later) and her hasty retirement from the sport, along with her death at the age of 38, mean that there has been persistent speculation over whether Joyner took drugs.
20 years on from Ben Johnson and Flo Jo, the recent furore over Dwain Chambers’ attempts to compete in Beijing are a reminder that drugs are still a problem in sport. The fact that young sportsmen like Chambers or David Millar feel that they have to take drugs in order to reach the top is quite depressing for a sports fan like me.
But there are encouraging signs. There were some high profile positive drugs tests at the recent Tour de France, notably that of the promising Italian climber Ricardo Ricco, but the silver lining was that Ricco thought he could beat the testers by using a brand new drug. He couldn’t. Increasingly, the testers are one step ahead of the cheats. Also, cycling teams like Millar’s Garmin-Chipotle are imposing strict anti-doping policies and being successful. That gives me a lot of hope.
Perhaps we should give Flo Jo the benefit of the doubt and just enjoy her gold medal performance as one of the greatest moments in athletics history.
1984. A summer blessed with two months of solid sunshine in the west of Scotland. Or so it seems as I look back it through almost quarter of a century’s worth of rose tinted spectacles. But when I wasn’t outside pretending to be Robert Millar, Viv Richards, Kenny Dalglish or John McEnroe, I was in front of the TV glued to the action from Los Angeles.
The event that really had me gripped was the decathlon and the exploits of Daley Thompson, the athlete who inspired a generation of kids to batter the life out of their computer keyboards. Thompson was the world and Olympic champion, but he faced a titanic struggle with his German rival Jürgen Hingsen, eventually needing to break Hingsen’s world record to take gold. I think the fact that competition involves ten disciplines over two days, with competitors often battling with injuries, gives the decathlon a sense of narrative that is often missing from other track and field events. The fact that it was Great Britain versus Germany probably helped as well.
The single moment that sticks in my mind, though, happened in the women’s 3000m race. Zola Budd was the new golden girl of British athletics: a world-record breaker at only 17 who ran in bare feet. That she had been imported from South Africa, a country that was banned from international sporting competition because of apartheid, only added to the hype that surrounded her. As things turned out, the final of the 3000m was completely over-shadowed by one incident when Budd bumped into American world champion Mary Decker, sending sprawling to the ground. The home crowd turned against Budd, booing her for the remainder of the race: she eventually faded to seventh place.
Kudos to anyone that remembers who won the race without looking it up.
I’m about to throw my blogging rule book out the window here, but I thought it would be good to have a bit of a build up to the start of the Olympic Games on Friday. By my reckoning, these will be the eighth summer Olympics of my lifetime and they begin on 08.08.08 – spooky or what? Also, our baby is due to be born on the same day; I’m not sure if there’s any significance in all of this, but maybe if it’s a boy we should call him Zeus.
For the next week, I am going to pick out a memory from each of the seven previous games to share with you, beginning with 1980. It has to be said that, being only three at the time, I was only vaguely aware of the Moscow Olympics, but Steve Ovett was one of my childhood sporting heroes (along with Steve Davis, Stevie Archibald… are you noticing a theme here?) so the chance to look back at his only Olympic victory is justified, I feel. One thing I do remember about Steve Ovett was his habit of waving to the crowd as he came round the final bend – something that I copied on my way to winning the Garnock Academy 2nd year 200m race in 1990.
Plenty has been written about the rivalry between Ovett and Sebastian Coe, particularly with regard to the 1980 Olympics, so you probably know the background. If not, you can read about it here. In summary: Ovett was favourite for the 1500m, Coe was favourite for the 800m, the 800m came first. I won’t spoil it for you.
One of the things I love about singing in the chorus is the variety of different concerts that we get to sing in. On Thursday night, we were performing as part of the Video Games Live event in Glasgow which was certainly different from any other concert I’ve done so far. The music was taken from the soundtracks of popular video games (from Pong through Sonic and Mario Bros to Halo 3); we had speakers on either side playing pre-recorded percussion and vocals for us to sing along with; everything we sang was picked up by microphones, had all kinds of effects applied to make us sound like medieval monks or alien warriors before being pumped out through loudspeakers; the orchestra had earpieces giving them a strict tempo so that the music would be synchronised with the video action being shown on a big screen and the light show; and – probably the biggest difference – the audience were almost all in their late teens and early twenties.
I really enjoy shows like that. The music might not be as inspiring as the Mozart and Walton that we sang earlier in the season, but there is a sense of being part of an event. The audience were clearly thrilled by the whole experience, which is surely what any live performance is all about.
Strangely though, it was almost impossible for us in the chorus to know what the performance was like. We couldn’t see what was being projected onto the screen, we didn’t get the full effect of the lighting and we could hear very little of what was being played (apart from the French horns, who were sitting right in front of us). As a result, I have spent the last couple of days watching bits of the concert on YouTube. Suddenly it all makes sense!
