That’s Australian silver my friend

Strewth! If there’s one nation synonymous with sport and sporting success then it’s Australia. A country with a population of 20 million champions the land 'down under' punches above its weight in the international sporting arena. If the failure of the Egyptian synchronised swimming team, African champions no less, to finish in any place other than last was not a surprise then the failure of Australia to finish above Great Britain in the final Olympic medal table most certainly was.

It wasn’t meant to be this way. The last time that Great Britain finished above Australia in the Olympic medal table was 1988. Those were the days when Margaret Thatcher lived at 10 Downing Street, Liverpool won the league title and Bob Hawke was taking time out from setting the world record for drinking a yard of ale to put in a stint as Prime Minister of Australia. Such was the confidence of the Australian politicians prior to Beijing that their Sports Minister Kate Ellis struck a bet with the British Sports Minister Gerry Sutcliffe that the representative of the country finishing lower in the medal table would wear the colours of the other at a public event. John Coates, the head of the Australian Olympic Committee, struck a similar bet with Lord Moynihan, his British counterpart, where the loser would pay the winner in bottles of champagne for each difference in the final medal count. It’s tough being a politician thinking of all these ingenious bets. Come the half way point in competition and the pressure was beginning to show on Coates who commented on the British swimming performance, "not bad for a nation with no pools and not much soap." Coates certainly has a keen eye for detail when he notes that the lack of swimming pools can be of detriment to producing champion swimmers. However, for a man that admitted offering thousands of dollars to IOC members the night before the Olympics were awarded to Sydney he should certainly be used to playing dirty.

Australia’s Olympic nadir took place in Montreal in 1976. A meagre total of five medals with no gold led to a feeling of national humiliation. The response was the opening in 1981 of the state funded Australian Institute of Sport. It heralded a change in fortunes for the Australian Olympic team with the forty medal barrier broken in 1996 and maintained ever since. The Australians had struck gold and the Department of Foreign Trade and Affairs (DFTA) was telling anyone that wanted to log on to their website, “The Australian sports system is unique and one of the most successful in the world. Sporting institutions across the globe emulate Australian programs, and Australian coaches and sports administrators are employed by many organisations and countries around the world.”

Following the completion of the Beijing Games the Australian team returned home to something slightly less than a heroes welcome. Sport is something to be celebrated in Australia as long as they are winning and finishing behind Team GB was not in the plan. In Britain all this winning has come as something of a shock. Gone were the years where you could name all the British Olympic medallists. Now they didn’t fill merely the cockpit of the plane home but each step down to the tarmac – and those were just the cyclists. It may take some time for Britons to come to terms with all this winning but fortunately the Premiership has returned to our screens just in time to remind us what the highest paid and most exposed sportsmen in our land are really capable of when they put their minds to it. Still, a concerned Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd announced his intention to review Olympic sports funding and in an unusual twist conduct a feasibility study of adopting the UK lottery funded system. Although this approach is unlikely to work in Australia because the critical mass of gamblers is a third of that in the UK it’s novel to see the Australian sports machine looking to the motherland for ideas. Perhaps they should re-energise the sporting grass roots and follow the lead set by various British governments in selling off school playing fields and removing any semblance of competition in school sports.

Annoyed glances have also been cast at several Australian coaches for daring to lend their expertise to the British Olympic resurgence. It is of course quite wrong for an Australian professional to seek employment in Britain. In the same way it is wrong for a Dutchman to coach the Australian football team to a World Cup, outrageous that a Kiwi be appointed to introduce the Wallaby forwards to a scrum machine or for a Russian to guide an Australian to a pole-vaulting gold in Beijing. Did someone mention double standards?

If Australia’s reaction to Britain’s Olympic success was somewhat lacking in grace and manners then France reacted with bitterness. No doubt still smarting from Paris’ failure to win the right to host the 2012 Olympics the French have now had to contend with their cross-channel neighbours comprehensively outperforming them in Beijing. Bernard Laporte, the French sports minister, commented graciously "We aren't just going to concentrate our means on four or five sports to bring home the medals, like the British have done." Of course he misses the fact that British medals were spilt across eleven sports but Laporte, lest we forget, is a man with pommes frites on both shoulders. That is one for each occasion when the highly fancied French rugby union team, of which he was coach, were comprehensively out-psyched and out-muscled by the English in the 2003 and 2007 rugby world cups.

British sport is safe from a French invasion in 2012 if Laporte is at the helm but irrespective of how the Australian athletes are funded or who coaches them the battle cry has already been issued by PM Rudd himself who has urged the green and gold hordes to “spoil the party” in London. The gloves are off for 2012 and no one will be dropping the soap.

DS

We're all watching you

It was a damp overcast day in August, and the clocks were striking seven thirty. Paula Radcliffe, her heart pounding, her foot inching towards the start line, though not quickly enough to prevent an abundance of self doubt from swirling within. On the side of Tianmen Square, opposite the start line, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures that are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. YOUR LEGACY IS WATCHING YOU, the caption could have read beneath it.

Despite setting 10 world records and being arguably the greatest female marathon runner of all time it is the Olympic Games that will define Paula Radcliffe’s running legacy in her eyes and those of the great British public. Beijing is Radcliffe’s fourth and, now aged 34, probably final attempt at Olympic gold. A hugely talented track runner Radcliffe lacked a kick finish which repeatedly let her down at the medal end of a 5,000 or 10,000 metre race. Switching to the marathon Radcliffe proved unbeatable and world record setting: until she arrived in Athens, 2004. Pulling out of the marathon with dehydration and later the 10,000 metres, accusations were levelled that Paula choked. It seemed that she was destined never to win the Olympic gold that she so craved.

As the face of the weakest British athletics team in living memory and with a chunk of Nike’s UK Olympic marketing budget invested in her spindly frame the pressure has never been greater. Unfortunately for Paula her body has never been weaker. Still recovering from a stress fracture of her leg and with a lack of training miles under her belt she is candid about her fitness, "If it was a big city marathon or even a World Championships (I'd say) do not push it, make sure I was well prepared. But I do not want to sit there watching it wondering what could have happened." Her courage can not be questioned. As her every move is watched in the streets of Beijing, Radcliffe will enter her own Room 101, the place where she will confront her greatest fear; her Olympic legacy. Whatever happens in Beijing Radcliffe deserves to be able to sit in the Chestnut Tree Café, the struggle over, with the victory over herself won, her place in the pantheon of sporting greats assured.

You can admire Michael Phelps and his inevitably remarkable 8 gold medals but the men’s 100 metres is the blue riband event of the Olympics. It always has been. History reveals a roll call of Olympic greats; Abrahams, Owens, Lewis, Christie, Greene. To that illustrious company is added Bolt, Usain Bolt. Bolt by name, lightning by nature.

It was billed as a showdown between the three fastest men in history at the peak of their careers but it never materialised. Tyson Gay fell by the wayside in his semi final and Asafa Powell lived up only to his Olympic record by finishing fifth. There may have been five other people that finished the final in less than 10 seconds but only Usain Bolt started his warm down with 20 metres to go confident in the knowledge that the gold was his. From first heat to final tape it was a simply outrageous piece of running. Let us hope that no amount of laboratory work deep inside the Ministry of Truth will cause history to be rewritten and alter the authenticity of what we were privileged to witness in the Bird’s Nest.

DS

57 channels and almost nothing but sport on

''The enormity of what we're doing just blows me away''. No, that’s not Michael Phelps after another gold in the swimming pool but NBC sports Chairman Dick Ebersol. The reason for Dick’s happiness is the scale of NBC’s Olympic coverage, “It's more live coverage from a single Olympics than the total of all previous Summer Olympics combined.'' At 2,900 hours, or 120 days of continuous watching, in a country where size matters then consider the numbers that NBC is putting up to be super-sized.

Of course, when you pay $894 million for the privilege of being able to broadcast sports such as shooting, a sanitised version of America’s favourite pastime, then the last thing you want is for the events to take place at unsociable times for your viewers. What to do? Simple, throw your greenbacks around and change the timetable. Despite protests from the swimmers, surely the athletes know their place by now; the finals have been switched from the evening to the morning in Beijing. This way the NBC executives in Rockefeller Center, New York can watch the live action when they return home from work. The curious thing is that if you are unfortunate enough to live on the west coast of America and wanted to watch Phelps’ fourth gold live then you would have tuned in to find NBC broadcasting Access Hollywood instead and had to wait another three hours for the tape-delayed coverage.

Over here on the BBC there’s no such trickery. At the unhealthy time of something past three in the morning Phelps is live and even if he has water in his goggles and can’t see where he's going he's still winning. As I prefer to sleep my way through the greatest one man show in Olympic history since, well, four years ago I have been following some of the more accommodatingly timed sports during waking hours. I’ve even found myself pushing the red button to see what’s showing on the BBC’s five other live broadcast channels and here I discovered the women’s weightlifting - 63kg category. I was transfixed.

My experience of weightlifting is limited. I once joined a gym and managed two visits in a year before cancelling my membership. I did learn that after using a weights machine you surreptitiously adjust the marker down a few notches to give the impression to the next person that you’ve lifted a lot more than you really did. Under the glare of the cameras in the University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Gymnasium, Beijing it didn’t appear possible to pull this stunt.

Early in the competition the hot favourite, a 20 year old Russian mountain range by the name of Svetlana Tsarukaeva, failed three times and didn’t register a score. As she left the stage in tears she walked head first in to a wall. I couldn’t tell if this was a simple misjudgement turning the corner or part of her warm down routine.

Michaela Breeze the UK’s sole representative in the weightlifting was a name that I wasn’t familiar with. Of concern was that she was suffering from a back injury coming in to the competition. Now, I’m not a doctor but I am sure that a weightlifting competition won’t heal a bad back. So it proved. Alternating between receiving physiotherapy between lifts and looking like she was about to snap in half during them Breeze was roared on by the crowd who recognised her pain and treated her like a winner. She battled through to register a score and finished 15th above the Tunisian and Bolivian competitors. Asked how close she was to pulling out, the response was tearful but emphatic, “It’s an Olympic Games and pain’s irrelevant. You train for so many years for this. I’m just delighted to be here.”

The highlight reels may be dominated by gold and records but buried deep within the bloated media output there are tales equally worthy of coverage that do proud the sentiments of the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin: "The important thing is not winning but taking part. What counts in life is not the victory but the struggle; the essential thing is not to conquer but to fight well." Michaela Breeze may have struggled to walk unaided from the arena but thanks to the likes of NBC and the BBC the world had a chance to share in one of the bona fide Olympian stories of these games.

DS

Team America

Politics and sport have never made the happiest of bedfellows. They normally end up in bed together after sport, on a celebratory night out on the town, has its drink spiked at the bar. Worse is to follow as sport wakes in the morning to find the other half of the bed empty and nine months later the politician refusing to take a paternity test.

Certainly the history of political involvement and symbolism in the Olympics is already well documented. From Jesse Owens defying Hitler in his own back yard to the ‘Black Power’ salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos in Mexico. From the Palestinian murders of Israeli athletes in Munich to the Cold War boycotts of Moscow and Los Angeles. The International Olympic Committee’s choice of Beijing as host of these games guaranteed that this trend would continue.

As the communist party PR machine cranked into overdrive in the face of protestors taking their pick from China’s manhandling of Tibet, human rights record and denial of free speech the world’s political leaders arrived for the opening of the Games. Spotted in the stands was the ‘leader of the free world’, George Bush, watching the opening ceremony with binoculars glued to his eyes. Was he looking for weapons of mass destruction or something more clearly labelled? His new best friend, Nicolas Sarkozy, was there but much to the disappointment of the viewing masses and Bush he had left his model-cum-chanteuse of a wife back in Paris. No doubt she was preparing for her meetings with the Dalai Lama. Vladimir Putin was there too but evidently using his binoculars to spy on his neighbours rather than admire the dove that was being elaborately depicted on the floor of the stadium.

Meanwhile on the eve of the games China’s President, Hu Jintao, took the opportunity to press the flesh with as many world leaders as he could poke a chopstick at and racked up an impressive 11 with only one change of tie. It’s Bush though that deserves a gold medal for his effortless balancing of sports watching and Texas style diplomacy.

Despite his day job Bush has rarely let politics get in the way of a good day out at the sport and in China he’s managed to irritate the hosts no end whether it be by making repeated calls for increased religious and political freedom for the Chinese or quite literally waving the stars and stripes in support of his countrymen. Brazen doesn’t do the guy justice. Watching Michael Phelps by day and cheering on LeBron James by night the camera doesn’t lie and the coup-de-grace was undoubtedly Bush’s visit to the US women’s beach volleyball team. As he performed a close inspection of the pornographically named Misty May-Treanor’s bikini, in much the same way that Hugh Hefner presumably would of a prospective addition to the playboy mansion, it’s the look of excitement on his face that tells us that Bush has finally found what he spotted through his binoculars on opening night. Still, I’m confident that this is one US politician that won’t be coming under pressure to take a paternity test.

DS

Warning: Olympics can seriously damage your health

It’s often said that the best vantage point for watching live sport can be found not in the stadium itself but from the television screen in your living room.

With media coverage at saturation point it’s hard to disagree but, as anyone that’s attended live sport knows, it’s impossible to replicate the atmosphere and drama in your living room no matter how many beers you might consume during the course of the rhythmic gymnastics final.

However, it seems that the Beijing Olympics may be the event that really puts this old adage to the test. With my BBC licence fee being put to spectacularly good use this year and paying for almost all programs to be broadcast ‘live from Beijing’ I have noticed that during the news bulletin on some days the Olympic stadium, nicknamed the ‘Bird's Nest’, is hardly visible at all over the newsreader’s shoulder. The Chinese are adamant that this is a combination of; heat haze, fog and too many fireworks but everyone else is calling it pollution. Concerned? If I can’t see the stadium with the powerful all-seeing eye of television then what hope has the humble paying spectator got?

Come to think of it – this lack of visibility and pollution could also present a problem for the athletes and apparently that’s what the Olympics are all about anyway. The American cycling team were quick to highlight this when they landed at Beijing airport with four of them wearing facemasks. Now I don’t know how bad the pollution levels are at baggage collection but the point was made.

In a bid to redress the PR balance Jacques Rogge, famous Belgian and head of the International Olympic Committee, went out of his way to praise Beijing for their efforts at cutting pollution. Apparently, there is "absolutely no danger" to the health of athletes taking part in events that last less than one hour. Not so reassuring for marathon runners then.

Rogge continued fanning the flames in much the way that only the head of an international sports organisation can, “I think objectively we can see that the Chinese authorities have done everything that is feasible and humanly possible to address the situation. What they have done is extraordinary. And you know what they have done? Planting millions of trees between the Gobi desert and Beijing. Removing hundreds of thousands of polluting cars.” Okay so far but they did create the problem in the first place. Jacques continued, “Removing very polluting factories to other regions of the country.” Ouch. And do you know what? Jacques is right. Beijing isn’t even the most polluted city in China – it was ranked seventh before they even started construction on the Olympic site.

Beijing’s air quality may be below that demanded by the World Health Organisation of developing countries but it isn’t the only Olympic city to have suffered from pollution. There were similar fears about Seoul and Athens and readers of more advanced years will remember the ‘pea soup’ smog that enveloped London and dissipated only following government intervention in the 1950s. Maybe one day the residents of Beijing will be able to consign to history the bird’s nest souper as the Londoners did the pea souper. In the meantime I don’t want anything obstructing my view from the couch or I’ll actually have to consider attending a sporting event to see what’s happening. Bring on the dressage.

DS

Olympic Memories

The Seoul games of 1988 marked a watershed in the modern Olympics. Following the apartheid and cold war inspired boycotts of the previous three games all the world’s superpowers were now back fighting for sporting supremacy. As for me? I was ready to enjoy my first Olympics. The only problem was that I was going to be stuck in a field in Essex on scout camp.

Unfortunately for me this was the age before mobile phones and the internet. Computers were still the size of a Ford Cortina and I remember waiting in line to call my parents from the communal phone to receive the shocking news that Ben Johnson had beaten the silken Carl Lewis to win the 100 metres. More astonishing was the press conference that I got home in time to see – Johnson was powered by drugs. That was my first Olympic memory and still the most shocking.

Other sportsworthy feats of note went relatively unreported as Stanozolol grabbed the headlines. Apparently some chap called Redgrave rowed a boat and a Canadian by the name of Lewis was a knockout in the ring. These feats didn’t register on my radar at the time but they got more than their fair share of positive headlines in the years to come.

Aged 11, with an obsession for all things sporting, the Olympics were a boy's dream. The world’s best runners, archers and synchronised swimmers had gathered on my TV screen to provide me with two weeks of compulsive viewing and my mum with two weeks where she didn’t need to worry about where I was during the school holidays. I realised that I didn’t need to know the competitors or even be familiar with the sport that I was watching. What’s important about the Olympics is the knowledge that you are watching the best in the world whether they be men, women or in the case of the old eastern bloc countries - frequently a combination of the two.

Thanks to the power of internet and wall-to-wall television there will be many more 11 year olds around the world who will be captivated by their first Olympics when the flame is lit in Beijing this Friday. I’m just happy that it will be Asafa rather than Baden Powell who will be holding my attention for what promises to be an equally historic 100 metres.

DS