Day Jar View

Just watching this bilge that is masquerading as a live broadcast of the GB athletes getting off the plane from Beijing.

I think they did a great job, but I’m sure that the last thing they need (or viewers want) is to see a dolly “interviewing” each of them with such bon mots as “how does it feel to be home?”.

Such insight gives ammunition to those who talk of scrapping the licence fee.

I’ve watched most of the Olympic coverage on the BBC this time around. From 8am to 6pm, then the highlights show at 7pm, I’ve been pretty much glued to the screen. Of course this hasn’t always gone down well with the missus, but then plus ca change eh?

A comment by Michael Johnson, the best visiting pundit on the BBC, made me aware of one of the most important reasons why I enjoy the spectacle so much.

For the past 20 years, my life is punctuated with key memories, which meld into one another with the passage of time, and don’t usually conjoin with a particular news event in my head. With the Olympics, however, it seems to be different.

What is it about sport that makes me remember watching Ben Johnson’s astonishing 9.79 in the 100m in Seoul 1988 on a 4″ black and white TV in my dorm room, under the duvet so that we wouldn’t wake anyone; Chris Boardman’s triumph on the track in 1992 as my girlfriend and I sat cross-leggged on the grass outside our tent on our first holiday away together; Michael Johnson’s 200m World Record in Atlanta whilst at our family home in France with my Dad and younger Brother; Steve Redgrave’s 5th Gold on the radio whilst in my bedroom in 2000; Kelly Holmes’ first gold in 2004 cooking in the kitchen.

I’ve watched so much of this Games, and seen all of the highlights, but I think I will remember the pool hall in Guildford where I saw Usain Bolt’s embarrassment of his fellow runners in the 100m, and Rebecca Adlington’s unadulterated joy at winning her first whilst I was busy helping change the worktops in our kitchen.

Who knows, in 20 years’ time, something else might flash in there, but that’s the beauty of memories; they are at once fluid and fleeting.

I was amazed the other morning. Radio Five carried one of their usual tabloidy phone-ins, and the topic was the Olympics, and the Brits’ success.

Instead of blanket celebration, there were a number of callers who simply couldn’t bring themselves to bask in the reflected glory. Instead they came out with all sorts of crap about how the sports we had won medals in were “for the rich” or “elitist”.

Ask our current crop of athletes whether they have any money, and I think most people would be surprised what a struggle it is for most of their lives when they are training. It’s only when they achieve success (and even then, only in the blue ribbon sports) that they can make some decent money.

Only a Brit would look at our medal table position (currently 3rd) and say it was a bad thing.

Watching the opening ceremony of the Games this pm, I was struck by how perfunctory and banal clapping can sometimes be. Especially if, like the poor maidens standing in a circle around the stadium, you have to do it on pain of death (possibly) for 2 hours or more.

However, yesterday my beautiful baby girl started to clap her hands, aged nearly 9 months. I can’t tell you how much that meant to me. That silly gesture that has always made me wonder what it is all about, suddenly became something magical. And that’s the beauty of being a Father I guess.

Not just so that you can appreciate clapping, but that it makes you see wonder and beauty and joy in the little things, all over again.

In 1992, NASA decided that the old adage of “Better, Faster, Cheaper – pick any two”, would no longer apply to them. With admirable chutzpah, of course underpinned by comfortable funding from Congress, they embarked on a series of missions with predictably mixed results.

For example, the Mars Climate Orbiter mission (cost $125 million) failed because the contractor, Lockheed Martin, failed to convert imperial units to metric units. I’m no engineer, but I think in anyone’s language this can only be descibed as “piss-poor”.

At the peak of the Apollo project, NASA’s budget was around 4% of US GDP. Every piece of hardware was so over-engineered that I seem to remember that out of a million components in the Apollo spacecraft, only a handful failed. Can you imagine if today’s cars were engineered to that degree?

This can hardly have been a surprise to those with an engineering background or, indeed, any experience of managing projects of any size. The fact is that most clichés have at least some basis in fact, and trying to do something better on less money is bound to end in tears.

I was reminded of Better, Faster, Cheaper this morning, when I woke up to blanket coverage of the Olympic Games opening ceremony day, that kicks off the 2008 Games in Beijing.

It has been said that the Chinese have spent around $40bn on the Games, the majority of that on new construction projects, including the famous “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium.

In the course of this massive project, over the past seven years the authorities have displaced thousands of people living in the shadow of the main buildings in shanty towns – ostensibly to clean up the city for all the visitors.

In addition, people have been told how to behave in public, there are stories abound of internet censorship for foreign journalists staying in the city, and a generally over-zealous attitude from the police has been reported.

So it may be Faster, and it may even be Cheaper if the Chinese recoup in revenues and overseas goodwill from the sanitised view of their country that will be presented to us. But is it Better?

Can it be said that the Chinese population will benefit from the Games to even some of the extent that, say, the inhabitant of the East End will surely benefit from the 2012 Games in London? Would any of our lot willingly give up their house for the good of the Games?

The Games is supposed to be about fair play, competition, inclusiveness and the celebration of the coming together of nations from all over the world. But it is hard to ignore the oppressive cloak of smog hanging over the city, that in some way represents the way in which the Chinese have gone about putting on these games, and the subservient way in which leaders of the free world have stepped around the human-rights issues that China has conveniently swept under the carpet for this event.

All that said – I am a big fan of the Olympic Games, despite the problems that invariably arise when the focus is put so sharply on the host country every four years. I can’t wait for the weightlifting, which for me offers the purest form of effort and performance over the 3 weeks – the characters are great, the exaltations when the bar is held aloft inspiring.

On a selfish note, one good thing that may come out of this competition is that it will finally persuade me back into the gym after 6 years of getting steadily softer around my middle. Three weeks of exposure to the finest specimens on earth (women pole vaulters especially), will both titillate, enthral and instil guilt – how many things on TV can you say that about?