I suppose there are a number of blogs out there which have been extra busy during the Olympics as the writers have been keen to share their opinions about the Games. And other blogs where there’s been little activity as the writer has been too busy watching to write. For this blog, though, the lack of recent posts is unassociated with events in Beijing.
I’m not a great fan of any sport, though I suppose I used to enjoy watching the football – supporting whichever team the boyfriend of the time supported. But, unlike the colleague from years ago who listed her hobbies on her cv as “Rugby, football, cricket, rowing – spectator only”, I have never really understood the pleasure of watching other people play sports.
In fact I’ve been travelling and pretty much managed to avoid the whole Olympic palaver. It was wonderful to realise I’d be at a conference centre without TV for the first week and then at my mother’s. She, too, has no interest in it all and has pretty much boycotted her usual news programmes.
We did, however end up talking about the Games the other night when we’d been joined by my siblings and were eating en famille.
The conversation turned to the poor performance of the UK synchronised diving team. Barely stopping to comment on how unfair it was that a boy of 14 who would have several future opportunities to compete should be paired with a considerably older athlete whose last chance it might be and whose disappointment must have been extreme when they came 8th (apparently the reports chose that term rather than the more honest, but less diplomatic “last”), we moved swiftly on to discuss the sport itself.
When did activities such as synchronised diving become Olympic sports? I used to do synchronised trampolining, so do have some idea of how difficult it is, but I’m not sure that difficulty alone is enough to qualify it as a sport. The same for synchronised swimming, of course, which is impressive to watch but somehow not a sport in the same way that hockey, badminton and sailing are.
The conversation then turned to other games and someone said that Bridge had been put forward as a possible Olympic event. Indeed, it seems that back in 1995, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) admitted the World Bridge Federation (WBF) as ‘part of the Olympic Movement’.
As a card game, Bridge clearly doesn’t meet my intuitive criteria for a ‘sport’, but it would at least have the advantage of incuding some older participants in the Games: many of the best bridge players are in their sixties and seventies.
However, although officially the WBF are still pushing to be included in the Olympic programme, it might be tricky for games to by played under officially approved conditions. Even now, most of the players I know would expect to be allowed to smoke while playing, and who ever heard of a Bridge game without some kind of alcohol on the side?
Worse still, perhaps, is the fact that the vast majority of the players would fail their drugs tests – what 70-year-old isn’t on medication?
don't confuse the narrator 