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 5th
in the heptathlon. Then the gold medal
winner tested positive within days and
the Brit moved up to 4th 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.
Caro Ramsay
I never knew about the "time bomb' lab. What a wonderful tidbit for a plot. But, Caro, can it detect whether Norwegian runners were involved in seeding storm clouds over Kenya?
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