He’s Back

Controversy might be all the Winter Games can rely on to sustain the interest of sports fans: some partisan marking at the ice rink, a wasted snowboarder vomiting all over the half-pipe, or Russo-American relations disintegrating in the hockey final.

The Vancouver organisers have made a brave pitch to create some early rumblings by inviting Arnold Schwarzenegger to carry the torch during the opening ceremony on Friday. Arnie’s candid and remorseless tales of steroid-munching in his days as a professional beefcake puts him for many firmly outside the Olympic movement and its ideals. 

Unfortunately for the Games, this one isn’t going to rumble: as Arnie pointed out himself, having lots of bulbous muscles in funny places isn’t actually a sport, and therefore pumping yourself up artificially shouldn’t be considered illegal in Olympic terms.

If there is any objection to Schwarzenegger lining up on the starting blocks on Friday it should be for this portrayal as Mr. Freeze in one of those rubbish Batman films of the late nineties. If anything is going to put you off all things related to snow and ice then it’s this:

It’s An Olympic Knockout

Here’s the latest in our continuing “the Winter Olympics is sort of a bit shit” series, Steven Bradbury winning gold in the short-track speed skating during the 2002 Games at Salt Lake City:

There’s something pleasingly un-Australian about the way Bradbury glides apologetically over the line for victory. He should feel sheepish: exactly the same thing happened in the semi-final. It’s definitely fun, but in a slapstick Saturday night primetime way. You can’t help feeling that custard and Stuart Hall should be involved somehow, or at least Bobby Davro in a fat suit.

I shouldn’t mock: it would take me about four days to complete the distance. There’s only so much momentum you can build up if you aren’t able to take your hands off the side of the rink.

He Still Hasn’t Got It

Back in 1988 I hadn’t quite developed the requisite faculties to distinguish between what was amazing and what was shit. Hence I really liked Gordon the Gopher and Peparamis, but I was immune to the general ridicule thrown at Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards during the Winter Olympics in Calgary. I just thought he had a massive chin and looked a bit like Penfold.

So I went through the archives at Youtube to have a look for myself and make some sort of retrospective judgement:

Yeah, he’s shit.

Mummy’s Little Soldier

 

This way old-timer

 

For someone who is so meticulous about the conduct of his players, it must have been a particularly trying week for Fabio Capello. Judging by this photo he looks to have aged 20 years, walking only with the aid of a zimmer frame. If the blizzard of dropped knickers and tawdry speculation wasn’t stressful enough, another nugget of bad news has landed like a winnet in his Horlicks.

Sir Alex Ferguson announced on Thursday that he’d withdrawn Owen Hargreaves from his squad for the final stages of the Champions League, an act which seems to harbinger the death of Hargreaves’ hopes of playing in the World Cup. He has been laid up with a knee injury for 18 months; Ferguson has previously suggested that his return has been delayed by a crisis of confidence, an unusually candid disclosure concerning the frailities of one of his players.

In some ways I’m not surprised when I consider Hargreaves. He has the diminutive physique and gauche curls of an under-14 badminton champion, and the light Canadian whine of a man who grew up being wedgied on daily basis. If you look closely enough you can almost see the the faint vestiges of the word ‘wiener’ scrawled onto his forehead. He has probably spent the last two years sitting in the nurse’s room at the training ground, sucking his fingers and waiting for his Mom to pick him up.

Of course appearances can be deceptive. The actuality is that on the pitch Hargreaves is a tiger and was by a distance England’s best player in the last World Cup. It was a tournament that culminated in a man-of-the-match performance in the quarter-final against Portugal and he was the only Englishman with the requisite testicles to score in the penalty shoot-out. He has the advantage over his team-mates in this regard, having completed most of his football education in Germany, where they know how to develop good testicles.

So chin up little soldier, there’s no need to be afraid. You’re a better defensive midfielder than Gareth Barry and probably a better right-back than Glen Johnson. We need you. Your country needs you. England that is.

Winter of Discontent

My disaffection towards the Winter Olympics is concerning me to such an extent that I’ve started shutting my head in the fridge door in order to jumpstart some enthusiasm for the chilly festivities in Vancouver. These extreme lengths are purely a product of pragmatism; the Winter Games will dominate the television schedules - there may be little else to watch. It’s the same cultural flaccidity that makes me wish I was a fan of horse-racing and Emmerdale, such is their ubiquity in the TV listings.

I was certainly more avid about the Games when I was a child. Perhaps because I was more excitable about everything: doing the hokey-cokey, fish fingers, mud.

But my apathy may have also been conditioned by circumstance. Ski Sunday was essential because it was an oasis in the Sunday evening desert that contained Songs of Praise and Antiques Roadshow. Plus it started with that thundering theme music. A DJ friend of mine bought it once on vinyl. I’ve never seen a club go off more euphorically than when he played it. Now it’s been relegated to the murkier corners of the schedules it’s now more Ski Early Hours of Monday.

Ice hockey was always a highlight of the Games for me, probably because it was the sport most like football and it had the added attraction of seemingly encouraging it’s participants to engage in the kind of fisticuffs that would make the Mitchell brothers blanch. It seems to have mellowed a touch with age on the evidence of the competition in the last Games in Turin. Added to which my failing eyesight dictates that for long stretches of the action the puck is just an abstract entity, only making itself known when it is parked into the back of the net.

Ice skating may be considered the blue riband event of the Winter Olympics, but I defy any entrant in Vancouver to produce something that is as entertaining as this:

Get Over Jt

If injunctions were enacted to prevent tedious reportage then the one that John Terry’s lawyers used would remain robustly in place. He is a footballer, they teach you these kind of indiscretions on your first day at the soccer academy. Terry did not sign up to the unwritten charter of probity that politicians do for instance, if he wants to commit wilful acts of unloveliness then it should have no bearing on his ability to captain his country. In fact his skill for relaxed duplicity may be requisite for the role, he does have to tell his troops that they’re capable of winning the World Cup after all.

The fact that he was bonking the mother of Wayne Bridge’s child is also a red herring. The credo that “you shouldn’t go there with a mate’s ex” should only form opinion in Croydon nightclubs and Grange Hill. Besides, if we were to scratch every potential England captain from the list on the grounds of dubious moral integrity then we would end up with Gareth Southgate as skipper. And no-one wants that. Particularly not in a World Cup year.

Gareth Southgate: A Moral Compass For Our Times

Be Afridi, Be Very Afridi

The dysfunctional firework that is transfer deadline day nowadays once again chucked up a few sparks and then despondently fizzled out into the usual morass of lower league loan deals. The highlight of which was David Sullivan’s boast that Egyptian striker Mido had signed on for the paltry wage of a grand a week, which he delivered with the same misplaced pride that I do when I inform my girlfriend that I’ve snapped up a dozen Pot Noodles for the price of eleven. Perhaps Sullivan doesn’t understand the meaning of a false economy but at least it gives Mido the opportunity to prove to the West Ham fans that he isn’t in actual fact the Shoebomber.

Thank heavens for Shahid Afridi then, a man at the centre of his own transfer inactivity recently at the IPL auction. His exemplary sense of the absurd spares me the need to write any words. I’ll just show you the clip, during which Ian Healy appears to claim that Afridi might land a jail sentence for his mid-match munchings.  As a special bonus DVD extra there’s also some nob running on the pitch for some rugger practice.

Here Come The Night Elves

Watching the Winter Olympics as a Brit is a bit like going to a party when you don’t know anyone: it all looks jolly good fun but you can’t help feeling on the periphery of things because everybody else is listening to Europop and wearing lederhosen.

If the Winter Olympics was a breakfast it would be that strange collation of cold meats and Emmenthal that is always served in continental hotels. It’s an attractive prospect on a one-off basis, but you wouldn’t be throwing out your Coco Pops in a hurry. It’s just a bit too weird and frightening to digest on a daily basis.

What I am struggling to say is that for the British sports fan the Winter Games has an exotic but not enduring appeal. We’ll tune in every four years, but we won’t be inputting the Nordic skiing World Cup on Eurosport into our Sky Plus consoles.

Still, there is one thing we can all certainly look forward in Vancouver come February 12. The opening ceremony has got to be seriously bonkers to live up to the legacy of its predecessors, which can only have been conceived by choreographers struck mental by the cold. Who can forget Barry Davies in Lillehammer in 1994 whispering in reverential tones as if Nelson Mandela had just appeared: “and here come the night elves”. If there isn’t at least one night elf performing next Friday then I shall want my money back.

Living Doll

Who was the last British tennis player to win a Grand Slam title on foreign soil? Sue Barker. Sue Barker. I know. Suuuuuuuuuue fucking Barker. It actually hurts my head a little to comprehend the fact that Sue Barker was a top-level athlete, and not a gardening expert on a regional news magazine show. Or a someone who iced cakes for a living. Or just someone’s very nice mum.

Virginia Wade is the same. She just looked like a ballet teacher. It just goes to show how much the women’s game has changed. I wonder how Barker would fare today with her balsa wood racket against the likes of Serena Williams. She might actually die out the court. Or at least start crying.

The best reason to talk about Barker is as an excuse to show this photo, in which Cliff Richard pulls off the neat trick of making a sparkly zebra-print jacket look halfway cool. Which it very obviously isn’t. But that’s Cliff for you. I often muse on what happened between these two lovers that made Cliff feel like he could never sample female flesh again. Makes you think.

Corrie Favour

It must be weird being a South African international cricketer right now. You’re just about to head off on a taxing tour to India and then virtually everyone ahead of you in the hierarchy either resigns or is sacked.  It’s like heading into your final year of school, gearing up for your exams, only for your headmaster to walk out and take the entire teaching staff with him.

I can only hope for the Proteas’ sake that the new coach Corrie Van Zyl has a greater sense of authority than any of my supply teachers. They usually arrived on the first bus from teacher training college with the kind of pedagogical aspirations only gained from having watched Goodbye Mr Chips too many times. Which we were too glad to destroy in a shower of flicked elastic bands. I guess we thought we were performing some kind of service to these greenhorns: if you couldn’t survive a squadron of snot-faced shits in tweed blazers, then maybe this lark wasn’t for you.

So be warned, Corrie Van Zyl. Don’t try and be their friend. Don’t ask the dressing room if anyone watched Red Dwarf last night. Don’t ever end any sentence with the words ‘man’ or ‘dude’. Never turn your back on them, particularly if there are bunsen burners in the pavilion.  And whatever you do, never ever and try to use a board-rubber to wipe off a pie-chart you’ve just projected onto a wall with a overhead-projector. Trust me, you’ll never hear the last of it.