Colm O'Regan: The Olympics restores your faith in watching things you don’t understand

Comedian and Irish Examiner columnist Colm O'Regan pictured in Cork. Picture: Denis Minihane.

Maybe you might be a bit football-jaded after the Euros, and wrung out after the All-Irelands. But the Olympics will always restore your faith in watching things you don’t understand. They’re irresistible.

I know there was a lot of hoopla about the Opening Ceremony Feast Thing. But I definitely didn’t see the Last Supper in it. If you saw the Last Supper there, you’ll see it everywhere you look. If anything, I thought the whole thing was an homage to Galway during Race Week.

What’s wonderful about the Olympics is that they awaken experiences and memories that lie dormant in the in-between years.

Like learning about an unfamiliar sport in which an Irish person is doing well. I now know which lines are ‘out’ in badminton, how important the sweat mopper is, how often to change the shuttlecock. Thanks to the Olympics, I’m now eight times more likely to say the word ‘pommel’. That most accessible of horses. The only gymnastics event I can replicate at home with the backs of two sofas.

There is the return of Lesser Seen Pundits. It’s like they answer to a bat signal from RTÉ. A badminton expert looks at the sky, solemnly lights incense at an altar, retrieves their smart casual for TV from a special drawer. They are new stars. 

Andrew Bree, the swimming fella who seems so excited it’s entirely possible he accidentally has co-analysts in a headlock in the closing stages. It’s pure sporting joy and nerdiness. They don’t look like they are trying to get a fuller-time gig out of this, but if he turns up in Dancing With the Stars I won’t begrudge him ‘making that bag’ as the young people say.

We see the much-deserved elevation of multi-instrumentalists like Greg Allen. The other star of the European 400 metres success. A lot of the time he’s reporting down the phone from golf RTÉ didn’t have the rights to, telling us that it was a difficult final round for Rory McIlroy. But it is here that he is finally on the track that suits him. We hear him rounding the bend of commentary at the track and field and striking for home, his majestic metaphors and emotional summings-up leaving others in the dust. A worthy successor to Jimmy Magee.

And of course the basketball fella Timmy McCarthy. Everyone loves his DOWNTOWN and BOOMSHAKALAKA but it’s more than that. With a Cork-American accent that evokes another time. A lost era when basketball had a proper place on Irish telly. A winter weekend of Burgerland, Neptune, Terry Strickland and Liam McHale with his tanned legs even in January. Outside it was cold and smoggy and factories were closing. But on the telly it looked warm.

No shade to the analysts of soccer or GAA but I’ve heard what they’ve said a thousand times before. They’re not going to tell me anything new. I want someone to point out that Daniel Wiffen hasn’t started using his legs yet. I’ll be looking for the tell tale signs for the lack of ‘white water’ in their swash in future, ready to repeat it verbatim in the residents bar at a wedding.

And it turns us into pundits. There’s me shouting at gymnasts for not spotting their landing properly. “Ah you made a hames of it”, I tell someone who has done two double piked salto somersaults in the tucked position. Me! Who has just recently hurt his Achilles tendon in a library.

“Take it handy now” I say to the World’s Coolest Woman Kim Ye-ji as she aims her air pistol.

I don’t know what they’ll evoke in the Closing Ceremony. Whether it’s the Three Wise Men or Lisdoonvarna, we’ll always have Paris.