Tag Archives: Olympics

My Winter Sports Career

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Yesterday I briefly allowed myself to daydream an entire new life for myself as a Winter Olympian. I quite like Curling, I can use a brush and, as a married man, am accustomed to taking orders from a woman. The Mixed Doubles would be a good fit. Unfortunately, after looking at the state of the man in our mixed doubles team after all his brushing, I was unable to see myself surviving that much effort. It’s clearly an awful lot harder than it looks.

Then I watched the ski and snowboard events. I’m not even sure what the actually call them, but they are like going down a ski jump and doing skateboard tricks so high up they use a drone the film them. I initially thought the black marks on the screen were litter blowing across the slope when they started off, but it turned out to be the shadows of the drones. It’s all very strange.

SO that left Luge. I mean, you do it whilst lying down and the slope does the rest. How difficult can that be? The worst bit would surely be wearing those stripy skin-tight suits, wouldn’t it. Well it seems there’s a bit more to it than that. The 95mpg speeds are a bit off-putting and the inability to see the bends. It seems you have to memorise them. And be consistent. So quick, and consistent, with the ability to see thorough soles of your feet. Possibly not for me either.

So I sat at home, watched TV, made a few notes and felt much refreshed by the end of the day. I was even able to read some blogs, answer comments, write some poems and do emails. Not the most active of days, but a definite step back on the way to health.

 

Brave New Olympic World

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I probably have a hundred things to talk about, but once I sit down at the computer I can’t think of anything to say.  It’s something I have noticed increasing over the years.

Checked my emails. I have a society newsletter to read. As usual, most of it goes in one ear and out the other. I have no interest in the doings of the Canadian Branch. I don’t even have much interest in the doings of the Northern Branch, and there’s always a possibility I might visit that one day. Note “possibility”. The reality is that I’ve been a member for six or seven years now and survived without entering a room filled with keen collectors and club attendees. I’m not a naturally sociable man.

More trouble with ASDA last night. Three things out of stock, one substitute that was twice as expensive as the one I ordered and the milk split. It often does. They are bad containers for transporting milk. The sub was Weetabix. Twelve originals for the same price as 24 own brand. They met their ‘price guarantee’ but I have difficulty avoiding the use of words like ‘rip off’ and ‘dishonest’. After much searching I was able to find an email form to tell them this but it didn’t accept certain date (date and delivery number) which it said was essential. So I spent ten minutes finding and filling in a form that didn’t work.

Lighting Glory over Little Gidding

I don’t use the delivery system because I think it’s better than shopping in person, or because I enjoy being messed about. I use it because I take immunosuppressants  and am supposed to avoid crowds and shops. After the whooping cough/hundred day cough/suspected collapsed lung at Christmas I am taking this seriously.

The Olympic Results are in. Not the ones where we add up the medals, but the ones where we look at the value for money and decide where the funding goes for the next four years.

The general, view was that there was some bad luck involved with boxing decisions, injuries and illness. But generally the problem was that the rest of the world was better than us. We’ve had a few good Olympics recently after pouring Lottery money into it, but the run has ended and we need to come up with something else. We don’t have more money, so we may have to resort to taking small children from their families and putting them into an Olympic factory system.

Next step – instead of kidnapping small children or offering sports scholarships and leaving it to chance and nature, why not grow your own sportsmen? The Aldous Huxley Centre for Sporting Excellence is just around the corner. Don’t tell me the Chinese and the Americans haven’t already thought of this . . .

They are also reviewing sports. Boxing is under threat. It has been a farce this year and it’s becoming less acceptable to inflict brain damage on people for entertainment. Even without the judges and the gender issues its days are numbered. You don’t need it when you have reality TV, where the ‘stars’ arrive damaged and proceed to inflict brain damage on the audience.

‘Breaking’ is out after one attempt, cricket is back in after last being played in 1900.

Cromer Clouds

Weightlifting and Modern Pentathlon are under review (there will be no horses in Modern Pentathlon  as it moves forward).

Lacrosse is in, as is flag football, squash, baseball, softball (yes, I agree – they are nearly the same). Is it my imagination or do North American sports always get introduced when the Olympics go to the USA? Or am I a cynic?

Sport climbing, skateboarding, and surfing are all now ‘core sports’. I can’t help feeling that surfing might be a bit of a problem in some locations, but time will tell.

Anyway, time to get off for a blood test. It looks like I managed to fill a blog post. The British Olympic Report will have to wait.

Sky over Southwold

Theme of today’s pictures – sky.

Good News Stories

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I wrote a couple of posts for yesterday, but decided not to use either of them.  After that I pottered about on the internet and forgot to post anything at all. Today I haven’t done much either. It’s 1.30am and I am only just sitting down to do some blogging work.

Last night I had a poem accepted for Cattails. I didn’t get round to submitting anything for the last issue so even though I was struggling last month I made an effort to submit some haibun and some tanka prose. I have had a haibun accepted. It needs a different title, which I’m struggling with, but apart from that it’s all good. This means I’ve had two acceptances from three submissions, which is good.

10p – B is for Bond

On that subject, I’ve just had one published in drifting sands haibun. I’m on page 42, with The Thoughtful Pig. 

I’ve been wandering around the internet searching fro inspiration and notice that Nigeria entered the track cycling for the first time at the Olympics. It was a last minute thing, as places suddenly became available, and they had no suitable track cycles. The Germans lent them one for the race, which was kind of them, and a throwback to the South Africans and Eric the Eel. It’s good to see, amongst all the politics, technology and money, there is still time for a heart-warming story.

The backdrop of Paris has made this a memorable Olympics, though the lack of VAR in the clay shooting, the gender confusion in women’s boxing and the pollution in the Seine have all detracted from the event.

10p – P is for postbox

As for the results and our place in the medal table, it’s been a bit disappointing as we have constantly come out on the wrong side of narrow margins and haven’t quite performed as the pre-games hype suggested. We did, however, have a 51-year-old skateboarder. At the time I thought he sounded a bit American. It turns out that he lives in America, was born in America, but has an English dad. However, nationality and athletes is a complicated subject and I don’t have the time or the enthusiasm to go into it now. It was good to see someone doing it for the enjoyment and he was quite clearly enjoying himself.

10p – F is for Fish and Chips

Revival

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It’s been a strange few days. After months of not bothering with poetry (I even have unopened poetry magazines, so deep has been my indifference to it – even ones with me in them, which is usually guaranteed to make me open them) I became slightly more interested.

This may have been due to the editing I did for the three lots of three poems I submitted for the end of July, though it wouldn’t account for all of it. It may also have been due to finally feeling that I’d turned the corner with my urological problems. It could even have been due to things I have seen in the Olympics (though that is the subject of another post).

Anyway, whatever happened I now have notes made for three new pieces (the first in months, as the submissions are edits of poems that were all started at least six months ago). Two of them relate to my visit to hospital ten months ago and several of them were started before then.

My first act after posting this will be to make a cup of tea. I haven’t had one for two hours and part of my Olympic learning is that hydration is important. I may then take some performance enhancing drugs, as they seem to be all the rage these days and there are so many great excuses that many people get off. My drug of choice is marmalade. Generally you can get away with it as long as you wipe your fingers afterwards.

After I will cogitate on the tactful way many TV commentators avoid talking about drug cheats and start work.

A Creaking gate Hangs the Longest . . .

 

 

Going for 100

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It’s been one of those days where I have, so far, spent over two hours doing nothing of any substance. It’s been all bits and bats and mostly consisted of emails, lists and blurred photos. It’s not productive, but it’s easy, and I have a habit of doing easy things rather than the ones I should be doing.

August is a light month for submissions, with just one that actually needs doing.  I also have four which can be left until the early weeks of September, but I have put them on the August list. This still leaves me with five compared to the seven I did last month. September is even worse – assuming that I do five in August I still have nine planned for September.

So far I have never broken into a sweat writing a poem, or found one I’ve struggled to lift. I haven’t even bled over one, despite the amount of paper I have handled. (However, I think I just found an idea for one . . .) so why does it seem so much of an effort? Not only that, but why is it so difficult to write until, you get close to the deadline? I know there will be people out there that don’t have this problem, but I’m one of those that needs the pressure of a deadline to make me work.

I can produce enough quality pieces to keep at least some of the editors happy. However, even to get to 100 submissions I need to do two a week. I’m currently on 59 for the rolling 12 month average. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that is about half of what I need to do. So do I go for 75 next year, which doesn’t seem very ambitious, or do I go for 85 (better) or just go all out for 100? It won’t be the 100 rejections this article talks about but even 100 submissions is going to take a lot of work. However, I expect you’ve already guesse what I’m setting as a target from the title. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to do . . .

PS, when I said I’d spent 2 hours doing  nothing much, it was just after 11am – I’ve spent another seven hours doing errands and other useless stuff since then. If they ever make procrastination an Olympic Sport I reckon I’m in with a chance. If Break Dancing (now known as “Breaking” can make it to the Olympics I don’t see why procrastination can’t.

 

 

My Lazy Day and Olympians – a Contrast

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Had a lie in. Had breakfast. Read some blogs. Checked my emails. Made lunch, which was bacon, mushrooms, black pudding, beans, sourdough toast, eggs and several pangs of conscience – it was not really what I should be eating. Watched Olympic closedown and Murder She Wrote. Dozed in front of TV. Made tea – heavy on the salad. Watched  Professor T. Sat down to write, but ended up reading more blogs. It’s now 10.45 and I really should do some work. Julia spent her day making a hobby horse, entering her Covid test results on the Mencap system, making apple crumbles, blanching and freezing beans and topping up the shopping after last night’s pathetically inadequate performance by Tesco – 2 questionable substitutions and 10 items not available. She also watched TV and ate. I really don’t know how she fits it all in.

I am ambivalent about the Olympics. There have been some great stories, and some heroic triumphs. However, it’s also true to say that a lot of rubbish has also been spoken. Tonight it has principally been about Jason Kenny being our greatest ever Olympic athlete. That is simply not true. He is certainly a great athlete, and has won more Olympic medals than anyone else in Team GB. He also seems to be a pleasant person, which isn’t always the case with successful athletes.

To be fair, he hasn’t said anything about it, it is journalists who  have been making the claim. Our top four medal winners come from cycling, a sport that has been highly organised over the last twenty years, extensively financed and where there are plenty of medals on offer. Does that make them great, or does it just make them prolific? Steve Redgrave, on the other hand, won his five golds in five consecutive Olympiads. What’s more, he won several of them before the current funding system came in and he won  despite suffering from ulcerative colitis and diabetes. If you want to see a candidate for a great Olympian, try him.

Or Eric Liddell. He only won one gold medal. He could have won more, but he wouldn’t run on Sundays and he had a short running career because he returned to China to work as a missionary. He also had a short but successful rugby career playing for Scotland. It’s hard, despite his solitary gold medal, to say that he doesn’t measure up.

The featured image is a sailing boat – they sail in the Olympics. It’s a tenuous link.

Olympic Stories

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Is it that time already?

There’s something about the Olympics that tempts me into watching too much TV. I see that GB won a silver in the women’s weightlifting (the frightening 87+kg class) and I’m told by Number One Son that she used to be a shot putter at the athletics club when he was a member. We had a couple of women in the top ten earlier in the competition. An interesting thing in the various stories is the difficulty with funding. However, they seem to have put it all together and while the expensive efforts of the rowing team came to nothing (and seem to have ended in acrimony) the women weightlifters can all be proud of their efforts.

There have been some great stories in the is Olympics, as well as some lessons in the double-edged nature of investing heavily in sport.

It was interesting to read something by Dame Katherine Grainger on Lottery Funding for sport. She said that when she started in the rowing team in the lead up to the 2000 Olympics the rest of the team members all had jobs or overdrafts or family to help them live as they trained. She, from the outset, was funded from the National Lottery money. (I use the word Dame because it seems polite, not because I agree with our honours system or think that the current crop of titles handed out to Olympians is appropriate).

It was refreshing to find that some of our athletes, such as Bethany Shriever and Charlotte Worthington, have had proper jobs and have struggled to get to Tokyo.

Days Lengthen, Spirits Lift…

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The theme of coldness carries over from the last post.

At around 10pm I went out to put a sheet on the car windscreen and ended up having to clear the screen before I could put the cover on.

It’s notably crispy this morning, though not quite as bad as I was expecting.

On a brighter note, I’m excused washing duties as we have Number One son visiting. We have a quinoa salad for lunch, made with tinned beans and sweetcorn, Eventually I intend making pots of the stuff using proper quinoa instead of the microwavable alternative and I will soak my own beans.

For the moment it’s enough of a culture shock without the extra cooking.

And talking of culture shock – it’s full daylight now. The days are really starting to open up now. If only the weather was more spring-like.

This may be good news for North Korean athletes who, it seems, are likely to do a spell in a labour camp after failing to perform in the Winter Olympics. At least it won’t be dark and dismal. This would tend to suggest that the carrot and stick approach may not work, particularly when the carrot is “extra rice” according to the article.

Meanwhile, anyone who came fourth in an event where one of the Russians won a medal is waiting to see if they are going to get an upgrade. I really despair of a world where an entire country is banned for drug use and the replacement “neutral” team provides 50% of the positive drug tests at the games.

I’m not going to add anything more, as there are plenty of accusations flying about relating to GB’s rise to sporting success and I don’t want to say anything that may prove embarrassing in the future.

This article is interesting, and puts things in stronger terms than I would dare.  You can’t blame people for taking a chance to be an international athlete, but it’s important to keep it in perspective. There is no surge in African Winter Sport. If we want to help Africa we should make it possible for the continent to host the Olympics. After what happened with the Commonwealth Games this may take some doing.

At least my joints are feeling better and I seem to be able to think again, even if I can’t solve any world problems.

A Poor Selection of Thoughts

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Just a few random thoughts today.

I’ve just been watching Donald Trump talking about  arming teachers. Putting a million guns into schools is a novel solution to the problem of school shootings and has certainly enhanced his reputation for innovative thinking.

The curling situation has developed in a way not necessarily to Team GB’s advantage. That is to say that after the men lost, the women also lost. They may still win tomorrow and gain a bronze medal, which will make it our most successful Winter Olympics ever. We’re currently lying 18th in the table.

If you add every medal we’ve ever won in Winter Olympics, it’s 10 Gold, 4 Silver and 12 Bronze. Norway, Canada and Germany have already surpassed that total in these games alone. I think Eddie the Eagle might be right.

That’s about it. Those two subjects are giving me all the thinking I can handle, apart from the thoughts I’m having about future posts. These will cover Part Two of the £32 million post, salad, quick meals and several on collectables.

The thinking, of course, is the easy bit. It’s the writing that takes the time.

 

What Does £32 Million Buy? (Part 1)

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The easy, topical answer, is that it buys a Winter Olympic team, along with 59 athletes, four medals and the material for some great film scripts.

A crowd-funded bobsleigh team, crashing skater and an ice dancer who came back from smashing a kneecap – it’s all there.

I’m not a great sportsman, as you may have guessed from my photos and various comments on size and sloth, but every four years I rotate through Olympics, Winter Olympics and Commonwealth Games. The kids make me watch a variety of World Championships, there’s the Rugby World Cup,the Rugby League World Cup and plenty of local news on skaters and kayakers who train in Nottingham. It’s hard not to get involved with all that around on TV.

Now, the question, as raised by National Treasure “Eddie the Eagle” Edwards, is, are we spending too much on Winter sports. We aren’t, it seems, a natural Winter Sport nation.

Unfortunately we aren’t naturally good at Summer Sports, cricket or football either.

So, where do I go from here?

I could go on to discuss sport, politics and the national mood, which always seems to improve when we do well.  It often improves when we lose too, as we all love an underdog and Elise Christie, though devoid of medals, has set an example of determination that’s a great example to the rest of us.

I could talk about sport and money. It’s a massive subject, and it has plenty to offer a cynic, particularly if, like me, you believe that the money would be better spent on developing better drugs programmes. If people want to run as fast as chemicals allow, let’s help them. I’m looking forward to the two minute mile.

However, for those who want to do it the old-fashioned way – hard work and dedication – I’d have a separate set of games. I’d also ban transgressors for life instead of handing them a short rest between games. Yes Justin Gatlin, I’m looking at you.

Finally, as we’ve sort of covered politics, cash and the cowardice of governing bodies, it might be a good time to mention James “Darkie” Peters. I’ll say no more. If you’re interested in the history of sport, apartheid and spineless administrators you will find it interesting.

In Part 2 I will look at what else you can buy with £32 million.