The Best Summer Of Sport.

It has been a wonderful summer of sport on the tele, which is interesting as there has been no live sport to see, but necessity is the mother of invention and there were huge gaps in the schedule that would not be filled by yet another rerun of Downtown Abbey.

From the BCC, empty, quiet  stadium

 no other runners.

How hard was it to focus?

The first interesting event was a virtual rerun of the Grand National, the 4.5 mile steeplechase run at Aintree near Liverpool every year. It was the correct horses, the correct riders, the graphics were superb and we could watch in the knowledge that, no matter how bad the fall was, nobody died.

And the final touch of realism was the commentators taking it just as seriously as if it was real.

Then we had the Impossible Games, an athletics meet in Oslo… and various back gardens.  Karsten Warholm ran a world record 300 metres hurdles against himself. The pole vaulting competition happened in various gardens around the world, with neighbours and friends re-setting the bar, various children looked bored as ‘Dad’ was at his work.  They ran a few Scandi races in the arena , those odd distance events that have gone from major championships,  two runners on the bend but socially distanced so they were two lanes apart- imagine trying to unwind the stagger on that.  The Norwegians did get a row for trying to hug at the end; they had to settle for an elbow rub.

Then came a total and unexpected joy. The Ingebrigstens ( the Norwegian family of runners I have blogged about before) were running a team 5000 metres ( it might have been  3000, I was too excited to notice ) against a team made up of the finest Kenyans over that distance, and as you can imagine the selectors had a lot to choose from. So how was this  going to happen? No social distancing for the Ingebrigstens as they all live together anyway and the Kenyans were all locked down at training camp, so it was all good.  The screen on the TV was split, the gun went off. One side of the screen was a lovely summer evening in Oslo, the other looked as wet and windy as Glasgow Fair Fortnight. It was chucking it down and every time the Kenyans ran round the bend into the headwind, they were nearly toppled over by the force of the gale. They were running with their heads down, just to protect themselves from the elements.

Needless to say, the Ingebrigstens  won by a huge margin. I think there will be a rematch later in the year.

We have had good football (soccer), interesting matches.  We have had the best of Wimbledon when they played proper tennis and the ball went backwards and forwards over the net- Borg, McEnroe, Connors, Ashe, Nastase back as far as Rosewall, Laver.  We had a summer of ladies tennis without grunting- Evert, Navratilova, King, Graf. Fabulous stuff.

In the last four nights we have seen the highlights of the 2008 Olympics. Usian Bolt running 9.69 in the 100 m, breaking the world record in that, the 200 and the relay.  Michael Phelps beat Mark Spitz’s gold medal tally, and re-watching those races, it wasn’t as clear cut or as easy for Michael as it was in my memory. That was the Olympics of Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins with a very young Geraint Thomas in the velodrome.

Every so often, the picture would freeze on a group of medal winners once they had crossed the line, and the story unfolded. It’s obvious with the progress of drug testing that what maskers are used now will be traceable in four year’s time. The dopers always lead the race, WADA are always playing catch up. In Switzerland there is a lab known as the 'time bomb' where samples from medal winners sit and wait, and are retested in the future.

So in the 2008 Olympics, a Brit was 5^th in the heptathlon.  Then the gold medal winner tested positive within days and  the Brit moved up to 4^th place where she stayed for 14 years, until another medallist Time Bomb proved positive and … come forward Kelly Sotherton  for your bronze medal.

Goldie Sayers had to wait until 2017 to get her javelin bronze medal, after finishing fourth in 2008, and then the Time Bomb went off in 2016 for one of the other medallists.

And while that is good, they did miss their moment on the podium, and I don’t think that anything can compensate them for that.

Caro Ramsay