As you will gather fairly rapidly I don’t like sport. I will be asking the big existential questions such as, why the hell do you watch fully grown men, who should know better, running around kicking and handling various shaped balls?
Issue 1: The Athletics World Championship: Seriously, what is the point?
You will all have noticed that the so-called Athletics World Championship has been going on. I found this out because when I switched on the television last night and tried to watch BBC2 I was faced with oddly shaped people running, jumping, throwing and doing myriad other vacuous manoeuvres. This was supposed to pass as acceptable television viewing and was being aired from 4.45pm to 9.00pm. That’s four and a quarter hours of watching people mucking about in what is nothing more than a glorified school sports day.
There is something pathologically wrong with people who are prepared to watch that amount of P.E. I was so shocked I nearly wrote to Terry Wogan on Points of View to air my astonishment and overall disgust.
So appalled was I, yet strangely fascinated, I ended up watching some of it. Now, there is a man called Usain Bolt – got a feeling that’s not his real name- and on Sunday he broke his own previous record in the 100m sprint, running it in 9.58 seconds. I suppose that is quite an achievement but people do go on about it. 100 meters is not very far to go and the whole event is over in…well 9.58 seconds. It’s not exactly entertainment for the viewer. Yes, it is very good but it’s the kind of thing I would expect to see in the Guinness Book of Records. All we need is a small insert in the book saying, ‘Man with oversized thigh muscles runs a short distance very fast.’ We shouldn’t have to hear anything more on the matter.
I mean I wouldn’t expect to hear about a man who carried an egg on a teaspoon across the state of Minnesota in international news. No, if he’s lucky he’ll get a mention in the back pages of the local rag. Apart from that he would only be fit for Record Breakers – RIP Roy Castle.
I think the real winner of ludicrous activities that parade as sport is the one where they jump into a sand pit. To try and spice things up a bit they have the triple jump, which involves a few arbitrary manoeuvres before the main event of jumping, namely one hop followed by one skip. There should be age restrictions for this type of activity; anybody over the age of seven should be prevented from participating.
Britain had good news on Sunday when one of our very own, Jessica Ennis, won gold in the heptathlon. Ah, the old heptathlon, everybody’s always going on about that one, so popular, so competitive. Surely, by the sheer randomness of this collection of activities which include doing a bit of running, throwing a ball and/or a spear and jumping, you’ve heightened the chances of winning to one in three. I refuse to believe there can be more than three people in the whole world willing to compete in heptathlons.
Looming ominously on the horizon is the 2012 Olympics, which apparently London is hosting. I personally think there should have been a referendum on whether we wanted to host the games in the first place. I find it odd that when we won the bid there was the assumption that the populace actually wanted this. I may stand alone, but I don’t find a large sports centre in East London populated with thousands of Lycra-clad athletes a very appealing prospect.