“That piaffe was exquisite,” I said, awed, to my girlfriend. Her eyes rolled upwards in long-suffering torment at my confidently professed knowledge of a movement in the dressage event. In the past two weeks, I have declared expertise in (among other disciplines) high-board diving, fencing and, perhaps most dubiously, omnium track cycling. Now it was grand prix freestyle dressage, watching Great Britain’s Charlotte Dujardin on her mount Valegro. I have ridden a horse just half a dozen times, and not for two decades, but as Dujardin’s routine concluded, I was confident enough to announce: “There’s the gold medal.”
Similar conversations have, I imagine, been taking place in homes all round the country during the Rio Olympics. As Mark Cavendish huffed and puffed valiantly around the velodrome in Monday night’s climactic points race, JK Rowling tweeted: “Don’t you DARE tell me Quidditch is hard to understand.”
A Games that was mired in controversy beforehand – and has never entirely shaken it, away from the action – has been, as a sporting spectacle, relentlessly compelling. Even if we haven’t always fully grasped the rules of the event we’re watching.
Despite the often highly unsociable hours, the 2016 Games have won over everyone from reception-aged schoolchildren to oldsters who might normally enjoy a bit of tennis. Much of this has to do with the amazing accomplishments of the British athletes, who have recorded their most dominant performances ever in an overseas Olympics. More than 10 million people watched the gymnast Max Whitlock win his second gold medal last Sunday, and an astonishing 11.1 million tuned in to BBC1 at 11pm on Tuesday to see cyclist Jason Kenny win the men’s keirin. There have been record ratings for BBC4, as well.
If you went off to bed instead, every morning was like Santa had visited overnight, with a new clutch of medals to celebrate. Sport is often a form of escapism and Britain has rarely craved distractions more than now. Uncertainty about Brexit has left everyone, even the “winners”, bruised and disillusioned. The Labour party seems intent on implosion, obliged to choose between two flawed candidates. Terrorist attacks are growing more shocking, depressingly frequent and closer to home. Success in the Olympics hasn’t made these problems disappear, but it has offered a much-needed summer holiday from them.
The old maxim is that it is better to watch sport live, in the round. In Rio, though, that might not always be the case. Everyone over in Brazil agrees that the conditions have been challenging. The João Havelange stadium, the venue for the athletics, is dilapidated, with few working lifts or toilets. Traffic in the city has been gridlocked, so bad that some members of the Dutch team have taken to commuting by bicycle. The attendance at many events has been woeful and the atmosphere embarrassingly nonexistent. Around 280,000 free tickets were given to schoolchildren in Brazil, but more than half of these were never used. It has been reported that bars show Brazil’s football matches on TV but otherwise boycott coverage of the Olympics.
This, in many ways, is sad: Brazil is in danger of missing an excellent Games. Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps, two untouchable Olympians, have signed off with, respectively, an irrepressible swagger and the meme-perfect #PhelpsFace.
But just as thrilling were the new stars. There was a fantastic moment when Bolt, in the bowels of the stadium, was caught on camera reacting to Wayde van Niekerk’s ridiculous world-record victory in the 400m. His hands go to his mouth, he spins on his heels, he’s genuinely flabbergasted. A metaphorical baton was passed over right then. Gymnast Simone Biles lived up to her impossible pre-Games billing. And is there a more beguiling and hypnotic sight than watching Katie Ledecky swim freestyle?
It’s true that much of the coverage has verged on hyperbolic, even jingoistic. Sometimes it feels we’re more likely to hear news of a Brit finishing seventh than about the actual winner of an event. Simon Jenkins in the Guardian argued that we have been too eagerly panting to anoint “heroes” and compared the British pursuit of medals – which comes at the taxpayer’s expense, of course – to the ideological oneupmanship of the Soviet bloc nations during the cold war. The BBC’s reporting was, he felt, comparable to “a British National party awayday”.
And yet a redeeming feature of the Games has been how genuine and endearing the winners often seem to be – certainly in contrast to, say, the Premier League footballers we have much greater exposure to. Phelps may have had a pre-Games net worth of around £40m, but in the main these athletes are not overindulged poodles. Mostly they are unknown and unheralded for all but a couple of weeks every four years. Even Kenny – now equal with Chris Hoy as Britain’s most decorated Olympian, with six golds and a silver – admitted before the Games that he didn’t have a personal sponsor because he wasn’t “pretty”.
The success of British athletes has, it should be noted, not been universally applauded. The sniping has been loudest at the velodrome, where Team GB won six golds, four silvers and a bronze. French, German and Australian rivals have pulled up short of outright accusations of cheating, but only just. “They were cannon fodder when you look at the last few years,” said Germany’s Kristina Vogel, who actually did beat a British competitor to win gold so can’t be accused of sour grapes. She added: “It is all very questionable.”
Vogel, and others, are right: there is little correlation objectively between British success at the Olympics and their recent performances in cycling world championships. But that, British Cycling bosses have countered, is exactly the point. Why waste your time peaking for a world championship, which no one outside your sport really cares about and which, crucially, has no impact on the funding the team receives? Far better to save your pennies and spend them when they really matter.
This approach, which is either cutthroat or very canny, has trickled down from cycling and rowing to swimming and gymnastics – and even trampolining and diving, where the country has pretty well zero pedigree. Team GB certainly did not invent extreme specialisation. South Korea was perhaps the pioneer of the approach, concentrating since the 1980s on more obscure sports, such as archery, shooting and, in the Winter Olympics, speed skating, to bolster its medal count.
But Britain has taken the tactic to another level. From 1996, when prime minister John Major decided that our Olympic performances were becoming embarrassing, funding for elite sport has increased from £5m to the £350m that has been invested in Olympic and Paralympic sport over the current four-year cycle.
The approach really is ruthless: we are never going to beat the US at basketball, so what is the point in investing in that sport? Medal success in track and field athletics will always be the hardest to achieve, which is why rowing and cycling receive more funding, despite having fewer active participants.
So is this money – which comes from the National Lottery and the exchequer at a ratio of 3:1 – well-spent? Participation in sport, according to Sport England, is declining overall despite Team GB’s unprecedented achievements at the Olympics. There are real concerns about grassroots facilities, as many local authorities are forced to make cuts of around 20%.
All of which means that British success these past weeks is probably most accurately seen as a fleeting and certainly expensive morale boost.
Leave.EU, the Brexit campaign group backed by businessman Arron Banks, claimed last week that the medal haul was proof that the country will thrive outside the European Union. “We may be small,” the slogan read, “but we truly are Great Britain!”
Such piggybacking feels a little desperate, though, and only really serves to remind us that soon Santa will take his bag of medals away for another four years and this blissful holiday from reality will be over.
