Monday afternoon and I’m making some lunch when I suddenly find myself invested in mountain biking for the first time in my life. Such is the Olympics effect every four years.
5 Live was covering events at Elancourt Hill in Paris, where Team GB’s Tom Pidcock was challenging France’s Victor Koretzky for Mountain Bike Cross Country Gold on the gravel. Pidcock has already had a puncture in the race, but had battled back to take the lead.
Koretzky had other thoughts, however, pushed past Pidcock on the home stretch only for their wheels to touch right at the death.
Jonathan Overend and Victoria Pendleton were commentating and as their voices rose I found myself listening intently to a sport I’ve never even thought about before.
“It’s like they are in the velodrome,” Overend shouted. “This is ridiculous, this fight, it’s absolutely thrilling."
A 90-minute race has all come down to the last few seconds.
“Oh, they touch wheels. They almost take each other out of the race,” Overend screamed, while Pendleton shouted “OOOOH,” in the background.
Dear reader, I even stopped eating to listen to the finish.
And Pidcock took it at the death, much to the French crowd’s annoyance.
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“Inside the last few metres he overtook his rival from France to win the most dramatic gold that we might see for Britain over the course of these games,” Overend announced.
“Tom Pidcock retains his Olympic title … unless there is such a thing as a steward’s inquiry.”
There wasn’t, so I went back to my sandwich.
It’s been tough to avoid sport this summer. That’s if you want to avoid it. The football kept me entertained for a month. The tennis I mostly ignored. The golf had a whispery chillout vibe to it which I enjoyed (I wasn’t really paying attention to what was actually happening once it was clear Rory McIlroy wasn’t going to make the cut, but I embraced the atmospherics).
As for the Olympics, I always think I’m not going to get involved, but they inevitably pull me in. On Tuesday morning I was trying to get my head around the laws of judo.
As ever with the Olympics, of course, it doesn’t take too long for 5 Live (and the BBC in general) to start annoying you with the insularity of its gaze. Never have the words Team GB been so overused in the last few days (well, not since the last Olympics). Every Olympic story is interesting, surely?
But in a week in which the distressing horror of what happened in Southport reminded us of the worst of humanity, it’s been comforting to escape into the vastness and the variety of the BBC’s Olympic coverage for all its flag-waving predictability.
On radio 4 on Monday evening Mark Steel concluded the latest series of Mark Steel’s In Town with a visit to Coleraine in Northern Ireland, which, even after 40 years or so of living in Scotland’s central belt, I still call home.
The comedian’s shtick is to go and spend some time in a place, get a sense of the lay of the land and then take a hand out of the locals. Coleraine, being a plantation town, most of that humour was very Northern Irish.
“There is a little bit of Protestantism if you look for it,” Steel suggested of the town, his tongue firmly in cheek. And it’s true we don’t tend to keep the Union flag good for the Olympics every four years.
What followed was half an hour on whisky (triple-distilled in nearby Bushmills, “not like filthy Scottish whisky that’s only distilled twice so it’s full of tadpoles”), Game of Thrones, the Giant’s Causeway, James Nesbitt (our local celebrity; I was in the Boys’ Brigade with him), Irish history and a mention of the town’s Olympic medal-winning rowers.
Steel did essay a Coleraine accent from time to time but it sounded like bad Belfast rather than the mellifluous accent you’ll hear in Coleraine and surrounding areas. (I may be biased.)
There was also a bit of steel (ahem) to the humour. The comedian ended the show by pointing out that the Troubles are in the past and that immigration is now one of the big political debates in Northern Ireland.
“I can understand why some people here are so opposed to immigration because if there is one thing that a Protestant community in Ireland shouldn’t have to put up with, it’s people coming from one country to settle in another.”
Spend any time in Northern Ireland and you’ll inevitably end up making jokes about 17th-century politics, I guess.
Listen Out For:
Death at La Fenice, Radio 4, Sunday, 3pm Julian Rhind-Tutt plays Donna Leon’s Venetian detective Guido Brunetti in this new adaptation of the first of her novels. Siobhan Redmond and Susan Jameson are also in the cast.
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