HE LOVES ONLY GOLD

I’ve kind of avoided commenting upon the London Festival of Hoops lately not least because it’s obviously not really my “thing” and nobody seems all that much interested in what the naysayers have to say at the moment when all the media attention seems focused on putting a positive spin on the whole wretched thing, but a comment from an old friend of mine who struggles along with more than her fair share of problems put it into a whole new perspective.

In her point of view, millions of pounds have been invested in those who are (almost by definition) the most “able-bodied” people in the country, whilst those who are “less-abled” (by means of illness or injury or any number of other reasons), face cutbacks to their services and benefits and almost unimaginable hardships as we strive to keep the country’s budget under control.

Yet somehow the necessary billions were found at the back of some sofa somewhere to pay for this sixteen-day blowout, presumably by making the assumption that all of those long-suffering people were somehow trying to screw the system and didn’t actually have anything wrong with them at all.

And that’s not taking into account the millions spent on advertising to link almost any product – no matter how inappropriately - to “the games” somehow upon the assumption that we’re all utterly fascinated by it all, and creating a TV schedule that can only either suck you in to the whole ghastly business or leave you watching old reruns from a time before the world went mad.

Still, the DVDs are getting a hammering and the recording backlog on the DVR is having inroads made into it, so “yay!”

Naturally, you can’t ignore the fact that, in the seven years since London accidentally “won out” to Paris, the whole financial system has managed to spiral into the kind of chaos which was totally unpredictable on 2005, but somehow when you see that the same old wealthy faces are still enjoying pretty much the same benefits of the system that they always did, and going shopping instead of sitting in the corporate seats that they’ve managed to wangle for themselves before heading back to the yachts bought from the personal profits made by mishandling the money the rest of us have earned, it’s truly hard to believe that they have made anything like the sacrifices that everyone else seems expected to, and you can’t help but wonder whether less of their tax money was spent on the shindig than that of the average working shmoe…

Meanwhile, my own countrymen seem to be failing to cover themselves in glory, and I’m not just referring to the medal tally, because when I use the term “countrymen” I don’t mean the bizarrely-monickered “Team GB” which seems designed to once again imply that “we’re all in this together” despite the fact that I’m not running or jumping anywhere, and the only medal I would ever be likely to win is if they offered one for sitting in an armchair reading a damned fine paperback, but then that bizarre use of the word “we” whenever a sportsperson achieves anything has always bewildered me.

Ah well, I suppose “we” did all invest in supporting “them” in “their” training programmes…

No the “countrymen” to whom I refer are those who seem to think that it’s okay to abuse a young lad who was trying his best for “only” managing to gain a fourth place in a world class field as if that’s simply not “good enough” even though by even being in that event he’s achieved far more than the vile abuser, sitting in the safety and comfort of his dark and distant room is ever likely to…

But then, this ridiculous notion that only gold really matters in these types of tournaments has been growing over the years to an almost ridiculous level, not least because our beloved media seem to only value those who achieve the “star prize” and almost dismiss (or at best grudgingly accept) the “also rans” as if the whole country is existing in some kind of grotesque parody of a school sports day attended by a population of those most vile of creatures, the “competitive mums and dads”…

We seem to have been infected by a modern British disease that seems to make us believe that winning at any cost is all that matters and that second and third place is almost dismissed in a – let’s not forget – world class field. I was reading some of the backlash to this small but irritating tale when one of the most vocal critics tried to defend his position by suggesting that this idea that second or third place is “good enough” is a “British disease” in itself, which is the point that I decided that I really, really didn’t want to have to deal with a country full of people like that any more and decided to have nothing more to do with it, and went away back to my armchair and paperback and decided to put myself into training for the “disgusted tutting” tournament, should we ever have one.

I do wonder, however, whether there’s this idea going around that, by being “host nation”, you should automatically be guaranteed a slew of gold medals but, unless you’re one of those supreme sporting nations like Russia, Australia, America or China, that seems highly unlikely, and they would, of course, have probably got their huge stack of medals no matter where the games were held.

I sometimes think that this is why people seem so eager to attract the Footballing World Cup back to these shores at some future date, almost as if by merely hosting that it would automatically guarantee a win for the home side, no matter how poor they actually were, just because that worked for England back in 1966.

So they tell me.

Presumably that is to dismiss all of the hard work involved in actually being any good at what you do, and, ultimately, as we continue to endure this whole wretched business of this carnival of “Running, Jumping and Standing Still” I kind of think that we may have begun to rather miss the whole point (or “spirit”) of the entire exercise…