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.'

Gender Trouble; or, Why Some Areas of International Sport Appear to Be a Bit Edwardian, Still

Marginality: 7/10 (I thought this topic was either incredibly marginal [up near 10], because the sidelining aspects of gender in sport are such troubling issues, or not at all, because these questions are so very mainstream. In the end, I wussed out and split the difference.)


Ninety-nine years ago this summer, Emily Davison drew a definite and long-lasting link between gender and politics. Not only was her protest set against the back-drop of a sporting event, it was fatally enmeshed in one; nearly a century later, however, it appears that Davison's sacrifice hasn't meant an awful lot. At least if the following three stories are anything to go by.

(1) Zoe Smith
I've got the news round-up on in the background, and they've just shown highlights from Zoe Smith's weightlifting. She's an articulate, intelligent, funny, self-deprecating, beautiful young woman. Does any of this matter in the context of her sporting achievements this afternoon? Not a jot. What matters is that, at the age of 18, she came in the top twelve in the world in her weight class. There were only 11 women who did better than her, a full 10 years before her weightlifting peak. Yet internet trolls are more inclined to focus on her looks and her weight. I know there's been criticism of Tom Daley since his perceived failure today, but none of that was related to his physique; in Smith's case, could it perchance be to do with her gender?

(2) Japanese Football
(H/T @bengoldacre) As I posted on Twitter a couple of days ago, the Japanese Football Association have a strange attitude to gender equality: while the men's football team travelled in first-class seats on the flight to the UK, the women's team travelled in economy. This was in spite of the fact that the women's team are ranked 3rd in the world, while the men's team barely scrape into the top 20. Although the relative financial pulling powers of the two teams might have had something to do with this -- 'they attract more income, therefore they get more spent on them', sort of thing -- behind every financial decision is a political one: why do the male players, inferior to their female counterparts in terms of skill, attract more money? Until we start to address these sorts of underlying questions, the vicious circle (men are seen as better than women => they are favoured more => they have more spent on them => they are seen as better than women) will keep on turning.

(3) Victoria Pendleton
Yesterday, a press conference with Victoria Pendleton that focused on the rivalry between the British cyclist and the Australian Anna Meares kicked off with the frankly astonishing question 'is Anna Meares a cow?':

On Five Live, one of the journalists very astutely commented that she doubted a similar question would be asked of a male athlete, switching 'cow' for 'sod' (I suspect she would have used something stronger in a less public-broadcasting context). This got me thinking: why is this, and what does it imply about media attitudes to sportspeople? Put simply, this question demotes women: instead of competitors, they are petty bitches; instead of sportspeople, they are political-correctness-gorn-mad glorified housewives. And until these sort of attitudes start to change, we're all going to be the worse for it: women, men, athletes, and soundbite-hungry, morally defunct journalists alike.