We just aren't built for Olympic gold

As you may have noticed, the London Olympic Games start a year from today. Given the Football Association’s inability to organise a party in a brewery, it is probably the only occasion in my lifetime when a sporting event of this magnitude will be held in the United Kingdom.

 Therefore, as a sports fan since childhood, I should be posting wallcharts and calendars in my office, noting the date and time of the womens’ volleyball quarter-finals and in particular, looking forward to the football at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, the only event for which I got tickets in the public ballot.

 And I am. In a year’s time, I’ll be camped in front of my HD television, monitoring what could be scores of broadcast streams from the BBC and existing on coffee and chocolate digestives.

 What I’m not looking forward to is 364 days of increasingly ludicrous public expectation stoked up by the BBC and the tabloids and 364 days of psychobabble from the British teams and their coaches.

 It’s happening already. Yesterday, a ‘shock report’ revealed that Britain is in danger of missing our target for gold medals. 

 Today, athletics head coach Charles van Commenee (a Dutchman imported due to the lack of capable domestic coaches) warned that his team was not ready and would need every bit of the time left before the opening ceremony.

 Responding to claims that his team might find it hard to live up to the hopes of an over-excited nation, van Commenee then said this. 

 "Athletes who are nervous are simply not focused enough. They have to upskill themselves by focusing better. If you are not focused, there is brain space to be nervous. You shouldn't have that. I find it unprofessional when athletes are nervous."

 I don’t know about you, but I feel myself reaching for my shotgun whenever anyone utters the words ‘upskill themselves’.

 Aside from that, this sounds like yet another example of a foreign coach being brought to Britain to produce silk purses from sows’ ears, then looking for an exit strategy as soon as he realises it’s all going wrong. 

 Van Commenee prides himself on not getting too close to his athletes (sound familiar, Fabio?), then complains that they aren’t focused and ready. Excuse me, but isn’t that what a (presumably well-remunerated) coach is supposed to do? Agreed, a certain amount is up to the athlete but don’t good coaches help them deliver that extra one per cent? 

 To continue the football analogy, Chelsea won the Premier League in consecutive seasons under Jose Mourinho. Andre Villas-Boas will be their sixth manager in the four years since he left, during which time they’ve won it once. You don’t suppose that has anything to do with The Special One’s ability to get the best out of his charges, do you?

 Public abuse of your athletes as nervous, unprofessional and unfocused hardly seems the way forward to me.

 And here are a few facts. Great Britain is a less than average-sized group of nations in Western Europe, vastly smaller than the traditional Olympic powers. The traditional Olympic sports, including athletics, have nothing like the level of interest from supporters and participants as in the other major Olympic nations.

 Most are the kind of sports which the BBC will exile to the Red Button for all but two weeks every four years, while giving us almost no live sport on BBC1 and paying Gary Lineker and Alan Hansen fortunes to watch football on television in a studio.

 It should be a miracle if we win one gold medal; the fact that we usually do better is often down to the individual determination of the athletes themselves - the likes of Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and possibly the greatest British Olympian of them all, Daley Thompson.

 It is certainly no thanks to successive Governments who starve sport of funds and then come out of the woodwork to join the standing ovations when we win something.

 Fly-by-night foreigners here to polish their CVs, who do nothing to lay foundations for better participation, a better level of domestic coaching and better facilities, should claim even less credit.

The great British weather doesn't get in our way

Regular readers will recall that this time a month ago 

http://martinwarrillow169.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-i-did-on-my-holidays.html

I blogged about how British Naturism’s week-long summer spectacular, Nudefest at Newperran Holiday Park in Cornwall, had proved a triumph despite being bombarded by everything a wet and windy British summer could hurl at it.

 Those of us involved with BN had hoped that our second summer extravaganza, the Great British Skinny Dip 

http://www.facebook.com/greatbritishskinnydip

which took place this weekend, would be blessed with better weather.

 Well, I can only speak for the West Midlands, the part of the country in which I enjoyed GBSD, but let’s just say that there is something amazing about sitting in a picturesque garden in an eight-person hot tub in July and being rained on.

 Heck, you’re going to get wet anyway, so what difference does a little rain make?

 OK, at times it was quite a lot of rain, but then we just went indoors to enjoy the excellent facilities at Clover Spa, the high-quality naturist hotel in North Birmingham which has garnered a great deal of national publicity since it opened just before last Christmas.

 There was good company, interesting and wide-ranging conversation and, pleasingly, a wonderfully wide range of age groups; naturism often gets pigeon-holed as something as only the middle-aged and beyond do, but my wife and I spent much of the afternoon chatting to two couples in their 20s who were as comfortable with the concept as we are.

 British Naturism is working hard, through events such as GBSD, to get those in their 20s to try out naturism in all its’ forms; whether it’s going to a weekly indoor swim, joining a naturist club, going on holiday to a naturist resort either in the UK or abroad (there are hundreds to choose from) or trying out somewhere such as Clover Spa.

 This weekend’s GBSD was another one of the many small steps which it will take before naturism is as accepted in the UK as it is throughout much of the rest of Europe. But there will be another one next year, hopefully with more venues taking part and with better weather. 

 It would be wonderful to see you there - you’ve got 12 months to think about it. In the meantime, go to www.british-naturism.org.uk, to find out more about the many places you can enjoy naturism within the UK and abroad.

Screwing the poor bloody infantry

‘Hacked to death’ was one newspaper headline, as the nation digested the closure of the News of the World.

 Surely only moral caution prevented a sub-editor somewhere offering up the one-word headline ‘Screwed’, probably in 140pt Helvetica bold with three exclamation marks.

 The newspaper known to generations of journalists, with considerable affection, as ‘The News of the Screws’ for its’ propensity to expose the dubious love lives of the famous, is no more.

 As the phone-hacking scandal became increasingly toxic for News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch, the ruthless and, yes, surprising decision was taken to kill it. I can’t have been the only journalist to have sworn aloud when I first heard the news.

 I will be astonished if The Sun on Sunday doesn’t rise from the ashes within the month, with considerably fewer journalists and an editorial budget of peanuts, just to give News Corp a presence in the Sunday tabloid market.

 Anyone with cursory knowledge of the way newspapers are going can guess this from the fact that News Corp were already planning seven-day working, with production journalists assigned across more than one title.

 Having seen this happen at close quarters, I know that it’s a recipe for two things; declining editorial quality as journalists are forced to work for a paper with which they have absolutely no affinity, as well as massive cost cuts.

 In my case, it saw entire layers of the process cut away in the name of efficiency. What was left was a group of good young reporters rewriting the same copy for different newspapers to save time, while production journalists were denied the chance to use any of the flair they had built up over the years because they had to work to pre-set templates.

 In this case, the savings will surely be used to shore up BSkyB, especially if News Corp is given the all-clear to buy the whole of the company which it now sees as its’ cash cow for years to come.

 But let’s not talk about the higher business and politics issues here; let’s talk about the ordinary reporters and sub-editors, (the latter, especially, some of the best in the business), who will lose their jobs as a result.

 Almost none of them worked for the NotW when the worst of the excesses were taking place. I’ve seen estimates that less than one in four will be offered jobs elsewhere within the company.

 Meanwhile, News Corp has reportedly offered the equivalent of 90 days’ salary to those pushed out, thus ruthlessly sidestepping the need for a 90-day consultation period with staff and unions when redundancies are made.

 No wonder Sun sub-editors are said to have walked out in protest when the news was announced.

 So, through no fault of their own, those journalists will now have to join the hordes of their fellows pushed out on to the jobs market by the big national and regional media companies in the last three or four years. 

 Good luck with that, then.

 As everyone from Hugh Grant upwards pontificates about the need for greater press regulation and, at the time of writing, News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks keeps her job, has anyone thought about the people who had nothing to do with this scandal (yes, it was a scandal of shattering proportions) but who are today facing the consequences?

The honest world of real journalism

Journalists? Up there (or rather down there) with lawyers, estate agents, MPs, Premier League footballers and private investigators, if you ask me.

 They’d sell their mother down the river for a story, lie their way into your house, nick your private pictures off the mantelpiece if you let them in and don’t even think about what they’d do with your mobile phone.

 That seems to be the general public perception this week of the profession from which I have made my living for the past 25 years.

 The revelation that News of the World reporters may have listened to Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages is surely bringing a sea change in the way the public views newspapers. Footballers, Z-list celebrities, soap stars have always been viewed as fair game, I think. That’s because media attention and all that comes with it is part of the territory. But an ordinary 12-year-old girl who was brutally murdered by a serial killer?

 And the problem for the likes of me is that the general public, who know no better, will think we are all up to it. That the reporter from the local paper, who knocks on the door of the victim of a car crash and whose visit is often a means for the relatives to get out their grief, really will steal pictures of the victim off your mantelpiece.

 That it is no longer safe to pick up the phone to an apparently friendly reporter from the local weekly, who is asking if they can come and visit.

 On the day the Milly Dowler allegations broke, I was among dozens of regional and weekly journalists at the funeral of Clive Leighton, a much-loved former colleague cruelly taken from us by cancer at the age of 58.

 One of Clive’s many claims to fame was his (possibly exaggerated) boast that during his career of over 30 years, he had managed to close more newspapers than any other journalist in the country. That was because his journalistic flair, which he possessed in spades, didn’t always match his commercial acumen.

 But Clive knew newspapers; he knew their readers and he knew how to give readers, if not always advertisers, what they wanted.

 And Clive would have been horrified at these revelations. As for those of us at his funeral, some even said what was going on made them ashamed to be journalists. 

 Because a hard-working reporter on a regional daily or weekly is as far removed from the news desk of the News of the World as David Beckham is from whoever plays in the No 7 shirt for Tamworth FC this season.

 But the danger of what is going on here is that we all get tarred with the same brush and that the journalistic profession is damaged beyond recognition. 

 At a time when the incoherent mess which makes up most of 'citizen journalism’ is posing a growing threat to the skills many of us have spent a lifetime learning, that would be a disaster for the world I love.