As one of Earth’s top-ranked hypochondriacs, I found one of the best things about the recent Olympiad was its efficacy as a diagnostic tool.
Among the many ailments of which I live in fear is Sjögren’s syndrome. This auto-immune disease has various effects, such as joint pain and fatigue, that could be confused with typical signs of ageing. But one symptom that couldn’t is the inability – due to inflammation of the lachrymal glands – to cry.
Having spent a recent fortnight drenched in a Niagara of Olympic-inspired tears, I am reassured there.
Without a tally of exactly how often events in Paris had a hand in my reaching for the Kleenex, suffice it to report this: the frequency rendered the average 15-year-old boy a feckless dilettante.
But why? On what imaginable grounds would a sad little middle-aged man sob remorselessly for 17 days at the efforts of complete strangers playing games in which by and large he has no interest?
Had the paroxysms been reserved for the likes of Keely Hodgkinson gliding to 800m gold, it would be less embarrassing. To be moved to tears by a stellar global achievement might even be sited on the outskirts of normal.
To be driven to deranged weeping by a bronze in the women’s park skateboarding is something else. Not that I’ve a thing against it. Along with boxing, running and javelin-throwing, it memorably featured in history’s inaugural sports report, Homer’s account of the funeral games for Patroclus.
‘And then did Odysseus of the many wiles dry himself with vine leaves on emerging from the wine-dark sea, where he came a disappointing sixth in the butterfly – and took to his trusty skateboard, where after nailing the switch backside 360 he scored 93.26 to pip mighty Ajax to the gold.’
Who doesn’t remember that, along with Achilles annihilating the world record for tent-sulking, from the penultimate book of the Iliad?
Yet, for all park skateboarding’s ancient lustre, a third-place finish for Great Britain’s Sky Brown, a charming Anglo-Japanese 16-year-old, shouldn’t necessarily be the catalyst for uncontrollable crying, shaking and the contortion of the features into an impression of Nigel Farage’s mad donkey face when he’s braying hysterically at the wilfully unamusing.
That reaction had nothing to do with the sport, or its competitors. It was driven solely by the flag.
Patriotism, if that’s the word, may or may not be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but it’s unquestionably the first refuge of the emotionally inadequate.
So it was that, even while the Union flag was being sporadically hoisted in Paris, it was starring in a less wholesome way back in Blighty. I assume that by now, a couple of weeks after the time of writing, the Scapegoating Olympiad held across England and Northern Ireland has also concluded.
Unlike such fellow freedom fighters as members of the apartheid-era ANC, our Neo-Nazis seem too easily chastened by the prospect of prison time. They revere their sovereign, but not enough to relish a few years as his house guest in the Palace of Belmarsh. Unlike Sky Brown, they lack ultimate commitment to their sport.
But they do love their flag. They and their sofa-bound compadres append it to social media profiles with such inevitability that, on Twitter and elsewhere, it packs the visceral sucker punch of the swastika.
This morning, the head of the Police Federation, last survivor from the golden age of the great trade-union baronies, was on the radio lauding the constabulary’s success in dealing with these creatures. The British police, she declared with a lurch into fearsome originality, are the best in the world.
How does she know that? Has she spent these last decades forensically analysing the performance of the police forces of Iceland, St Lucia, Vanuatu, Singapore, Moldova, Suriname, Guinea-Bissau and all the other 190 UN-recognised sovereign states, and scientifically concluded that ours is better than the bleeding lot of them?
In some areas of police work, to be fair, she may be right. When it comes to Activating Sirens To Get To KFC In The Nick Of Time Before It Closes, not to mention Doling Out Crime Reference Numbers For Insurance Claims After Burglaries It Has Not The Vaguest Intention Of Investigating, they may well stand atop the podium.
But to call anything the ‘the best in the world’ solely because it is British, when it hasn’t been tested against the rest as Sky and Keely have, is another version of nationalism posing as patriotism – the same force that had some of us weeping at the world’s worst anthem because a man whose name we would forget within the hour won a shooting event we wouldn’t watch if it was held in the garden; and had others taking to the streets to terrorise the already tragedy-stricken holed up in Holiday Inns.
Perverted love of country is a disorder that presents with various symptoms, some absurd and others pernicious. On balance, being all cried out, I think I’d rather have Sjögren’s.
The Oldie September 2024
