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.
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