Limbo with Alcohol

Re; the title, it’s always a good idea, isn’t it?

At the start of the summer I had it in my had that I was going to update this blog with a fine piece of original writing at least every week. Needless to say that didn’t last very long, although I’m not entirely sure why. I’d blame it on being incredibly busy, rushed off my feet, in fact, but that’d be rather untrue. It’s not as if I’ve been short of topics to write about either, there’s a veritable stable of half-begun post-horses that have fallen by the wayside, for one reason or another. And anyone who’s spotted the little Hillsborough rant below, I’m not counting that; a spur of the moment, unchecked blur of injustice! 

So, I assume you’re all (yes I realise all is a slight exaggeration here) absolutely desperate to hear what I would have written? Of course you are, as much as this is akin to that awful moment during Who Wants To Be a Millionaire when Chris Tarrant rips up a check for sixty-four thousand pounds in front of your eyes.

I was very close to being very repetitive, actually, my next-to-last post had been about performance-enhancing drugs, and then the Lance Armstrong story broke. A tad cruel of the US Anti-doping Authority, I’d thought… Nonetheless it just occurred to me how much fall-out from the early part of the last decade still remains, when it comes to professional cycling. There is an endemic lack of trust in what you see before your eyes, and simply as a sports fan, that’s pretty painful to sit through. It’s certainly not over either, as much as it seemed like a rather perfectly plotted tragedy when the prototypical fighter, Armstrong, delivered his statement. There was no admission of guilt, simply an admission that he was backed into a corner, a last desperate attempt by the consumate may-aswell-have-been-a-statesman to prolong the siege of so many hearts and minds that he’d held for so long. In the end though, I think he simply chose to be tried by proxy, because his former manager and friend being found guilty, as may well happen (and although Armstrong’s climb-down suggests otherwise, it’s not impossible that Johan Bruyneel could be acquitted, I suppose), would mean very much the same as Lance going down himself.

Away from sport (yes I can hear the gasps), local events reignited a rather morbid curiosity of mine in Michael Gove’s ‘free schools’. Although of course it’s wrong to absolve the previous Labour government of any blame here. (Just this week Lord Adonis, the Labour peer and involved in education policy, described them as the future.) My thoughts are pretty succinct, I disagree with the idea of the British private education system on principle: Your wealth should not determine the quality of education you are given. (An episode of the BBC’s genealogy programme ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ with the comedian Hugh Dennis illustrated this quite articulately, actually, as he finds out about the scholarship which allowed his grandfather to escape going down the mine in favour of  a secondary education, well worth checking out if you like that sort of thing.) The ‘sponsored’ system is however, if better for it’s more comprehensive and less selective nature, symptomatic of the growing trend seen in this government (predictably) to privatise things which ought not to be controlled by the whims of capitalism. The quality of an education should not depend on the ‘autonomy’ (a buzzword which all of the ‘delighted’ academy heads seemed scripted to parrot at regular intervals in the videos which are on the DfES website) of a governing body. I’m not entirely as au fait with this subject as I’d like, so I’m going to avoid parroting any ridiculous clichés at this moment in time, but when the government is talking about a single exam board and cosying up to the Pearson company, it becomes clear that there’s a worrying trend in education policy. Socially selective education isn’t the answer, but neither is commercialised education, and that’s the scary prospect.

The last real thing I’d half-heartedly written concerned, well, me. I was wondering why exactly I write such ludicrously pointless things as this, and still haven’t really hit upon an answer, to be blunt. But it sparked me thinking about being at a delicate little crossroads in life. I’m about to be off to university, and I’ve spent the last month or so cocooned in some bizarre form of limbo where there is a lot of alcohol, some fairly large sub-woofers, and a few gorillas playing chess in the Student Finance HQ (I think they’ve had me at checkmate for ages, although maybe they’ve just started toying with my pawns.) It’s been, to be glib, pretty damn cool, as is the thought of all the people I like to think of as friends crawling all over a map of the UK. (Although, there must be something attractive in Durham, god knows what, but they’re like moths to a flame, I swear I can slip a few more insect metaphors past you, too.) It’s an odd one, but being able to plot a penniless course through the next three years is fun, even if the aftermath promises to be ever more uncertain.

Oh, and I’m forgetting the dirty Harry Potter pick-up lines, they were the highlight, really. (Will try them on you on request and pending a sense of humour audit.)

Finally, I’m going to revive the Pretentious Poetry Corner in order to show you one last thing: Carol Ann Duffy writes on Hillsborough.

THE Cathedral bell, tolled, could never tell;

nor the Liver Birds, mute in their stone spell;

or the Mersey, though seagulls wailed, cursed, overhead,

in no language for the slandered dead…

not the raw, red throat of the Kop, keening,

or the cops’ words, censored of meaning;

not the clock, slow handclapping the coroner’s deadline,

or the memo to Thatcher, or the tabloid headline…

but fathers told of their daughters; the names of sons

on the lips of their mothers like prayers; lost ones

honoured for bitter years by orphan, cousin, wife –

not a matter of football, but of life.

Over this great city, light after long dark;

truth, the sweet silver song of the lark.

Sporting Scar Tissue?

Is there anything that seems more impotent than an aged sprinter? Of course this is a facetious point, but watching one of the athletics-related documentaries which have been everywhere over the last few weeks, it’s striking how, in the BBC’s ‘The Race That Shocked The World”, the likes of Ben Johnson go from muscle-bound man mountains, to the slightly faded image of a lapsed gym-addict. It’s not as if the man appears weak, far from it, but in the fascinating piece of programming, all seems beautifully poised in order to paint him (as well as the seven others he raced against) as a tragically naive fallen idol.

Idol is one of those words that from the days of the old testament we are always told is overblown, while ‘tragic’ is an adjective that is again overused, and more pertinently, misused. Not in the case of Johnson, who’s athletic feats, and ultimate fall from grace would make a fine Shakespearian drama. The documentary is not just, however, about Johnson’s misdemeanours, which undeniably left an indelible mark on how we view sporting excellence. Filmmaker Daniel Gordon gives due prominence to the stench of doping which emanated from three-quarters of lanes in the 1988 100m final. It’s here that the ultimate sporting dilemma rears it’s head, does it ever become okay to dope, if everyone else is? Or is every doper part of a virus slowly killing elite competition? This is something that is topical to this very week, too, as yet another big name road cyclist has returned a positive drugs test, and as I remarked to a friend, when you consider the successful cyclists of the last twenty years, it’s incredibly difficult to find someone with spotless sheets; it’s left me wondering why the authorities even bother prohibiting performance-enhancing drugs.

All of this is why, as much as Bradley Wiggins’ colourful rant at those who insinuated that his Sky team may have been involved in systematic blood doping á la the US Postal team of Lance Armstrong’s heyday was entertaining, it seemed misplaced. Cycling is a sport that has such a damned reputation in terms of doping, and as his eloquent Guardian column the day after illustrated excellently, there are far better ways to deal with understandable accusations than to rant and rave.

Over the course of le tour it’s fair to say that it’s been hard to escape the spectre of drugs, and perhaps we could be forgiven for looking at every cycling or athletic triumph with scepticism, but then, if you step back far enough from the ugly and unbecoming fall-out, what’s left over can still be inspiring. In the past few weeks cycling has seen the former drug cheat, and future olympian David Millar win a stage, and he’s perhaps an example of one of the very few athletes who’s been able to salvage a successful, righteous, career from the wreckage of a drugs ban, and then yesterday Mark Cavendish, last year’s ace sprinter turned self-sacrificing team-mate to Wiggins tweeted that, on finishing he was being sick over himself and barely knew who he was. Whilst then you can forget the feats of the man who benefitted from the disqualification of Ben Johnson way back in Seoul, gold went to a certain Carl Lewis, someone unequivocally one of the most incredible athletes the world’s ever seen.

In reality then, it didn’t take me long to find my answer: It’s comforting to see that, behind all the allegations and doublespeak, sport retains this incredible power to showcase men and women who truly do incredible things in the name of simply proving themselves as the best. To do so on drugs would lack that essential sense that you’re watching simply another human. In another recent documentary, Victoria Pendleton, coincidentally another cyclist, explained the incredible lengths she’d been pushed too during training, and then the, quite difficult to comprehend for us mere mortals, eviscerating disappointment she’d felt after failure. In any other walk of life this sort of melodramatic behaviour would be seen as perhaps petulant, but when the world sits down to watch these athletes in a couple of weeks, and when we find ourselves yet again astounded by human beings ostensibly similar to us, and when we realise how hard they work in order to test exactly how far the physiological boundaries of being human can be pushed, it all becomes incredibly poignant.

There’s a reason sport throws up so many great stories (and here I say great to refer to the narratives and not as a particularly moral judgement) it’s because when the line between success and failure is a thousand times narrower than the line separating the elite from everyone else, there’s something intangible that makes the difference. It’s a little depressing to see how amazing people can be at specific things, when the rest of us were either never talented enough, or never dedicated enough (and never likely to know which, either) to reach such a peak, but then it becomes very clear, if you find something you can do, these sporting endeavours become incredibly inspiring. They’re certainly evidence enough that ambition is possibly the most powerful thing in the world, if you’ve got the perseverance to keep it.

As I suppose is pretty clear by now, I, a massive fan of sport, have had to distance myself from the patriotic arguments in favour, or otherwise, of having the Olympics in this country. But when taken as a purely sporting discussion, I’m convinced that to be present for the inevitable stories that will write themselves over the next month, whether it’s the potential dethroning of Usain Bolt, how blade-runner Oscar Pistorius will fare, or even seeing if Tom Daley can do what he’s been at pains to explain to us in his latest Adidas advert.

When we’re talking inspiration though, I’ve neglected to mention the Paralympics so far, and that seems criminal, because often forgotten after the Olympic fanfare has died down, and oddly relegated to Channel 4 in the UK, there will be likely far more incredible performances, and some heart-warming stories too, I just hope that it won’t be naive to have forgotten about drugs for a month.

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I really enjoyed writing this, which is perhaps why it is so very long, but the two documentaries I mention are both still on the BBC iPlayer and I can’t recommend them enough, while I’d love your opinions on all of this too.