Tommy Martin: In next two weeks, we’ll find Olympic ideal, that moment of golden glory
A general view at the entrance to the Olympic Village during the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
My first memory of Olympic glory is Daley Thompson winning the decathlon in 1984.
I remember watching it on the black and white television in our kitchen, Thompson soaring through the sultry Los Angeles sky atop a bendy pole. Flopping onto the mat with a cheesy grin, he then executed a perfect celebratory backflip, as if the pole vaulting part hadn’t been enough of a challenge. The BBC used it in the Grandstand opening titles for years afterwards.
Why the fascination with Daley Thompson? I wouldn’t have considered us a Daley Thompson house, per se. And why the black and white telly, not the colour one in the sitting room? Was I furtively watching Daley Thompson on my own? Was there something about his raw British masculinity that was considered de trop in 1980s Ireland?
I’m not sure whether I really do remember it, or whether it’s a trick, the way memory splices images in later so the clutter in your brain makes sense. It could be I am filing the Grandstand clip into the neural box marked ‘Golden Olympic Moments’, as if my brain was a middle aged man’s DVD shelf.
But that’s besides the point. So is the fact that Thompson was a bit of a charmless berk. With that vault and casual reverse somersault, he became my earliest embodiment of faster, higher, stronger. The Olympic ideal, to this six-year-old, was a muscular black man with a lustrous moustache.
I guess everybody has one, a Thompson or a Nadia Comaneci or a Carl Lewis or a Katie Taylor or a Michael Phelps or a Simone Biles: an Olympian who fixes in their mind what that concept is all about, with its connotations of gods and glory. Figures who, in our minds, commingle with the colour of the medal around their necks, like statues in a pantheon.
It is these images that sustain the Olympic ideal through the years of controversy that mark out the time between Games, and very often the time within Games. What else could explain the continued survival of a concept responsible for systematic corruption, endemic cheating, eye-watering financial misappropriation, and synchronised swimming?
No Olympics is complete without its own particular flavour of scandal, be it vote-buying, human rights violations, or a dodgy logo design. And yet that shiny ideal remains remarkably resistant to the filth and grift that follows in its wake. It is, in fact, a golden shield, allowing the Olympics to charge on regardless.
Though recent candidate cities, like Boston, Los Angeles, and Rome, have seen local protests against the civic carnage the Games leaves in its wake, the Olympics always finds somewhere to pitch its tent, holding a hand out for tax breaks while demanding you build it a 5,000-seater skateboarding arena.
It is almost as if the Olympic movement are engaged in their own version of Citius, Altius, Fortius: bigger, more expensive, more ridiculous.
Backflipping into Tokyo 2020 this week is the gold medal man of this bureaucratic decathlon, Thomas Bach. The International Olympic Committee’s president is not a popular figure in the host nation for his determination to make sure these games go ahead amid escalating Covid-19 infections, despite the continued disapproval of the Japanese people.
So he was in diplomatic form on his first public appearance, praising the resilience of the host nation, except that he managed to call them the “Chinese people,” which, even without an exhaustive knowledge of Sino-Japanese history, you can imagine didn’t go down well.
Luckily for Bach, no one will be watching him soon. The IOC president understands well that without the quadrennial fortnight of muscular young people running around, riding things, jumping in water, shooting at stuff, and all the rest of it, the Olympic movement is just old white guys making dubious deals in far-flung places. And NBC wouldn’t buy the rights for that.
Indeed, Bach admitted to existential fear about the Olympics’ very future if Tokyo was cancelled. “[It] would have added to the already many doubts surrounding the Olympic Games…Our doubts could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Olympic Games could have fallen to pieces. That is why we had to keep these doubts to ourselves. We did it together. We did it for the athletes.”
Okay, saying “we did it to fulfil massive commercial and broadcasting obligations” wouldn’t have sounded quite as noble, but maybe he is onto something. If Tokyo had yielded to the pandemic, would the spell have been broken? Post-pandemic, would the very concept of the Olympics, this bloated, unsustainable roadshow run by an unaccountable, unreformable, supra-national cartel, suddenly seem horribly dissonant?
Typically, the sound of the starting gun silences the doubts, for two weeks at least. This time? The local organising committee have not ruled out cancelling the Games mid-stream, were Covid-19 numbers to explode. Already the drip-drip of positive cases from within the athletes’ village has created a sense of foreboding.
The festival atmosphere of Olympics past will be absent. The local populace are resentful. Athletes have been warned off the traditional post-event, interdisciplinary nookie. Organisers will pipe in crowd noise to pep up the competition. Would Daley Thompson have performed his backflip in an empty stadium?
And yet, sometime in the next two weeks we’ll find that ideal, that epitome, the sweaty strain and furrowed brow of years of preparation that suddenly explodes in a moment of golden glory and tells us something deep and triumphant about the human condition.
Maybe it will be wearing a green shirt. At least it won’t be in black and white.
