OLYMPICS: Summer of love
Okay, straight up. You came to laugh, well to snigger. Those are our defence mechanisms. Olympic opening ceremonies are the purgatory of sporting life, three hours of suffering which you offer up before getting through the gates. And how would the Brit love of pomp and circumstance make us suffer? Not at all as it turned out. As Danny Boyle’s visceral, two-fingered defence of the NHS unfolded bizarrely right in the middle of this mad carnival, we began to feel small and begrudging. By the time we got to the end of this great big, humorous, eccentric, half-mad expo of all that is distinctive about our noisy neighbours we were thinking about handing these 26 benighted counties back to the stars of the show, James Bond and her Maj.
At the track most of our thrills were vicarious. The post-Sonia famine grinds on as reliably as the shaking of Jerry Kiernan’s disappointed head. Still. There was the 800 metres. We virtually won the greatest race of the games. When David Rudisha first walked into Br Colm O’Connell’s training camp, he was a fish out of water. Wrong man. Wrong tribe. Wrong place. He became O’Connell’s greatest star and his most loyal disciple. His 800 metre final was a runaway train of a race. Rudisha smashed the world record. Andrew Osagie of GB who came last would have won gold at any of the last three games with the time he submitted. It was said that the last time Rudisha had broken the world record his tribesmen slaughtered 50 cattle in his honour. This time surely, they would be opening a chain of burger joints.
