And Now, The End Is Near

Marginality score: 6/10

Over the past few days, I've been musing on age, the passing of the years, Time's wingèd chariot, and all that. But enough about missing deadlines and depressing conversations about years of birth; I'm talking about athletes on their (literal and metaphorical) last legs. In amongst the stellar performances from teenage wunderkinds in the pool, and the sharing of gold and silver men's 400m medals between two competitors with a combined age a year younger than the GB football team captain, there have been several examples of medals won at the other end of athletes' careers: Beth Tweddle (who, according to Louis Smith, is 'getting on a bit' at the age of 27) taking bronze on the asymmetric bars; Vicky Pendleton ending her career with two medals on the track, the last of which -- in the last race of her career -- was a silver behind the Australian 'cow'; and Nick Skelton leading the GB show jumping team to gold at the age of 54. As Skelton admitted, he hadn't been particularly successful in his Olympic career, stretching back 20 years:

'I've waited a long time, been to a lot of Games, made a lot of mistakes, but you couldn't do it in a better place than London. This has to be my greatest moment. [...] I said to the guys we needed to go out there and win it. I've waited 54 years for this, so you can certainly say it was a long time coming. I've had a few misses in my time, but finally we got there.'

This, for me, is what the Olympics is all about: training, and waiting, and sacrificing, for a lifetime -- whether it's 27 years, or double that -- in order to be the absolute best. This is why these athletes keep going: not for the love of the sport, although that has to be a factor; not for the rush of competition, although again that particular shot of adrenaline probably helps; but because they truly believe they have the ability to be the best.

Over at The Golden Latrine, there's a really interesting piece on what silver and bronze medals mean to those who miss out on gold. While I have to agree, however, that silver and bronze are 'a reward for exceptional performance, a reminder that you are among the best in the world at what you do', I can't help but feel that what makes an Olympian is the existence of a real belief in one's ability to remove that 'among' -- this is why Skelton, Tweddle, Pendleton, et al keep going.

In the end, the last word must go to (Sir? surely) Bradley Wiggins:

'Once you have been an Olympic champion, you don’t talk about the other medals. If asked, I will normally say "I won three golds" because that’s the only colour that matters.'

'Everybody hates us -- we don't care'

Marginality score: 6/10 (This scoring will be a regular thing, as I give my highly objective tariff for the relative marginal status of each of the sports/competitors I blog about. Because everyone likes ratings, right? Or maybe it's just stats geeks like me.)

Everyone's favourite angry Manxman gave a couple of interesting responses when being interviewed after his second consecutive failure to win Olympic cycling gold. One was a delightfully ranty answer to an unwelcome question about the after-effects of the Tour de France on his performance in London:

The other was a much more introspective, sombre sequence; according to Sad Cavendish (let's call him Mark Mark I), the failure of the British team was down to the lack of help they got from other national teams:

For those of you not familiar with the ins and outs of cycling road racing (so that's the more sane 98% of the population), a word about team tactics: in a stage race like the Tour de France, success on any one day is not a very big issue; overall time -- the General Classification -- is key, so there's little point in busting a gut to finish as high as possible on any one day. Bradley Wiggins, this year's TdF winner, only won two stages out of 20, but consistently finishing in the top 20 or so was enough for him to win by a margin of nearly 3-and-a-half minutes. Often, a breakaway of 6-10 riders will escape the pack (peloton) and one of those will win the stage; unless someone who's high up in the overall standings joins one of these breakaways, the rest of the riders -- who are divided into teams of 9 -- won't bother chasing them down.

In a one-off race, however (the Olympic road race, for instance), there are two major differences. First of all, overall position does matter (whatever your gym teacher told you -- try telling someone like Steve Redgrave that it's 'the taking part that counts'), and secondly, the teams are much smaller -- 4, rather than 9. So when a breakaway gets away from the field, reeling it in is both more important than in a longer race (as if the breakaway isn't caught, those in the peloton won't get medals) and more difficult (more riders on a team = more bodies to spare chasing down escapees = an easier ride for the team favourite [in France, Wiggins; in London, Cav]).

To return to the first interview, with Angry Cavendish (Mark Mark II), the interviewer may have had a point, although it might have been a bit galling for AC to hear that the media and supporters might have thought his month in France had a part to play in his failure. Perhaps the members of the British team, 3 of whom took part in this year's TdF (Cavendish, Wiggins, and David Millar), were still in 'stage race mode': when they realised that a breakaway was forming ahead of the peloton, maybe there was a collective assumption that this wasn't such a problem. 'Tour de France fatigue', in other words, might take various forms.