Row, Row, Row Your Boat.....

You’ll not be surprised to hear that the Australian media is in the grip of Olympic fever. I assume it’s the same back in the UK but, since long before the Sydney games, the Australians have been plotting how to turn themselves into the world’s greatest sporting nation, despite the fact that there’s only 20 million of them (see previous posting - Sink or Swim).

Sport in general, and the Olympics in particular, offers a great opportunity for celebrating two much-prized qualities, toughness and mate-ship, the latter embracing women as well as men, at least in sport. So you can perhaps imagine the horror when one of the members of the women’s rowing eight, well, just stopped rowing. And that when they were in contention for gold. Sally Robbins says she was overcome by exhaustion, translated by the media into losing her bottle, giving up, and betraying her team-mates. Yes, her team-mates were apparently angry. According to Sally, some of them immediately suggested that she might be more comfortable in the water, rather than in the boat, and offered to help her move, though this morning‘s bulletins merely said that her team-mates “expressed disappointment“ with her. I bet they did.

Luckily for Sally, she’s not the only one. There was some scathing coverage of Paula Radcliffe’s withdrawal from the marathon. Not only was she the race favourite, but she’s also British, which is added cause for schadenfreude. There’s a big debate about whether Australia should align itself, culturally and politically, with south-east Asia, New Zealand or America but they seem to have decided they’ve finished with Britain. As one Australian academic pointed out in another context, this country was founded on rejection by Britain. So this morning’s Daily Telegraph (no resemblance to the British one) pointed out that the women all ran the same course, in the same heat, including the same hills, and lots of them managed to finish. But not Paula.

I don’t think anyone but the athletes themselves understand the pressure of preparing for, and competing in, something like the Olympics. Amateur athletes who have run or cycled themselves to a pain-racked standstill will have some inkling but at least they can humiliate themselves more or less in private. But if there’s one group that’s not qualified to castigate Sally and Paula (and thank goodness it wasn’t a bloke who packed) surely it’s journalists. Newsrooms are inhabited by some of the least fit and healthy people on earth and while you can, I think, comment fairly on something like politics by observing and associating with politicians, I don’t think you can begin to accuse athletes of moral failure unless you’ve felt some of their pain personally. And perhaps not even then.

This is not confined to the Australian media, of course. I once tried to commission some coverage for one of my programmes about the Snowdonia Marathon , only to be rejected by the sports department on the grounds that “it wasn’t a proper race.” This verdict was delivered by someone so over-weight and out of condition that I suspected him of using a golf-buggy to move between his office and the newsroom. I consoled myself with a personal vision of the agonies this person would suffer if, by some miracle, he ever managed to drag his bulk around the course. I’d run the race myself so came up with some very vivid and satisfying pictures and organised my own coverage.

PS On a happier note, the rainbow lorikeets have returned to the garden after the winter. They’re as rowdy and acrobatic as ever and they’re very welcome.