The Olympics changed what it means to be a winner

The Games are not just about revelling in sporting prowess - they offer the hosts a chance to reboot their city and country and remake their sense of identity.

By Ed Smith Published 08 August 2012

Mo Farah wins in London. Photo: Getty

In the seconds before the start of the Olympic 10,000 metres final on Saturday 4 August, Mo Farah, who had come to London from Somalia as a young boy, bounced expectantly on his thin, wiry legs, his expression open and eager. Some athletes look coldly invincible before they perform; Farah looked all too human, vulnerable as well as excited. Sporting expectation alone would have been hard enough for him. But this was a much broader kind of pressure.

Farah’s victory provided some of the most intense drama of the Games – the intensity that follows when real excitement is compounded by deep anxiety. Jessica Ennis, the poster girl of the Games, was so far ahead of her competitors by the time of the final event in the heptathlon, the 800 metres, on Saturday evening that she seemed certain to win gold. Her victory was secured by glorious increments rather than one fantastic race. Not so Farah. He knew, as we did, that the next 25 minutes had a horribly binary complexion: there could only be disappointment or joy.

Farah’s performance in the 10,000 metres reflected the whole London Games in less obvious ways, too. Like London, Farah faced the challenge of great expectations. He was the bookies’ favourite to win. In the same way, Britain – for all the naysayers – was expected to host a successful Games. It is a rich, stable and tolerant country and London is undeniably one of the world’s pre-eminent cities. If we are honest, it ought to be able to host a good sports tournament, especially given the £9bn Olympic price tag and the way that London has bent over backwards to tolerate IOC regulations.

Yes, coldly calculating, London should be able to stage a great Games, just as Farah was the favourite to win the 10,000 metres. But somehow that only exacerbated the tension. It was hard, watching the race, not to imagine all the ways in which it could go wrong. It was a “slow” race, which suited Farah because he has the kick to lose the field in the final lap. But the slower pace also made it a congested, niggly race, and he received many bangs from stray elbows and knees. He could end up fatally “boxed” by the pack of runners around him, or, worst of all, he could trip – the disastrous image I couldn’t banish from my mind.

We had all imagined similarly disastrous scenarios for the whole Games. The weather could ruin the party; London’s already bulging transport network could buckle under the strain; medals might be scarce and optimism might fade; the Olympics might present a Britain lacking self-confidence and drifting away from world significance.

As the 10,000 metres final heated up, Farah ran more smoothly than ever, looking as though the pace was taking less out of him than his rivals, his eyes revealing a glint of joy and self-belief beneath the concentration. The last few laps were one of the most moving experiences I’ve had watching sport. It became clear that no one could stretch out the race beyond his comfort zone, no one was fast enough to shake him off. When he crossed the line first, blowing a kiss to the crowd, we knew it for certain: London had a triumph on its hands.

Farah’s victory brought to life what we had hoped these Olympics would be about. “I came as a young boy from Somalia, but this is my home – this is where I grew up,” he explained after the race.

I

So what do the Olympics tell us about modern Britain? Do they show the way we view ourselves, the way we think about success, and what we expect of the future?

The problem is that the Games tell us most about what we tell ourselves about ourselves. The subtlest element of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony was the way he made a new vision of Britishness seem so familiar. It purported to be progressive, but with a reassuringly sepia tint. Where most opening ceremonies are ponderous, boring and predictable, London’s was a riot of fun and mischief. Boyle’s central narrative was necessarily simplistic – yet it provided a thread on which he could hang dozens of expressions of Britishness. Just about everyone got to watch something personally touching, whether it was the celebration of the National Health Service or a scene from a rural cricket match. By the same logic, there was something to irritate almost everyone, too.

There were a few dissenters who complained that it was propaganda for a left-liberal view of Englishness. “I feel like I’ve just watched a £27 million party political broadcast for the Labour Party,” tweeted the conservative journalist Toby Young. But most observers did not interpret the opening ceremony through a political lens. Perhaps that was part of its skill. The most seductive art persuades without you realising you are being persuaded.

Above all, Boyle’s vision of Britishness suggested mature self-confidence, a country too witty and well adjusted to need grandiose statements. “We aren’t China; we aren’t America,” it announced; “we can’t be and we don’t want to be.”

At times, that spirit, which captured the mood of the nation so well, went missing once the competitive programme began. Invariably the home country focuses on its athletes – but surely not to the extent of ignoring the rest of the field. Sometimes the BBC and newspaper coverage suffered from trying to turn every Olympic contest into a tribal battle between Team GB and the rest of the world. The Games have been most un-British, and most unattractive, when they have been most jingoistic.

II

These Games have shown how the image of “a sporting champion” has changed. Twenty-five years ago, in line with the worst strands of Thatcherism, the image of being a winner was aggressive individualism. It was assumed that John McEnroe-style outbursts would become the norm, because “nice guys finish last”. Not so long ago, a leading sportswriter chastised Colin Jackson for congratulating his friend and rival Mark McCoy for winning a gold medal.

That is absurd. These Games have proved that sportsmen do not gain any competitive advantage by losing their dignity or forgetting their friendships. Usain Bolt talks about Yohan Blake, his fellow Jamaican who won a silver medal behind Bolt in the 100 metres, like a younger brother, thanking him for pushing him hard. Farah was thrilled that his training partner, the American Galen Rupp, won silver. As we have learned from the rivalry of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, the greatest rivalries are underpinned by respect.

The courteous respectfulness of the British athletes – whether it is the rowers at Eton Dorney, the sailors in Weymouth or the athletes in the Olympic Stadium – has been one of the inspiring features of these Games. Moments after his own triumph on Centre Court, Andy Murray described what he had felt watching Farah’s win. “I do repetitions in my training,” he said, “and when I’m completely fresh, I can run [a lap] in about 57 seconds. His last lap was 53 seconds. It’s just unbelievable fitness.”

The way we describe sporting success reveals new misinterpretations. “Talent” has often been used as a dirty word, replaced by nouns with a clear moral dimension – guts, determination, sacrifice. The message is clear: medals should be earned by an effort of willpower, preferably

a triumph over adversity. This subjugation of innate ability reached its apotheosis in the baffling backlash against Michael Phelps. The phenomenal American swimmer collected the 22nd Olympic medal of his career, making him the most decorated Olympian ever. Inevitably, the debate followed: was Phelps the greatest Olympian of all time?

Many pundits invoked the bizarre logic that Phelps’s physical talents give him an unfair advantage (his double-jointed ankle bones and huge feet create a “flipper” effect, it is said). Tyler Clary, his own team-mate, expressed a common view in a sharp phrase: “The fact that he doesn’t have to work as hard to get that done, it’s a real shame.”

Revealingly, the comment was interpreted as a shocking insult (Clary quickly apologised). For me, as an ex-professional sportsman, I think the idea of being a 22-time Olympic medallist without training that hard sounds pretty cool.

But increasingly only those skills earned the hard way qualify in measurement of achievement. And so, innate physical advantages must be held against sportsmen who achieve greatness. What a tangled way to think about success. Must the Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar lose credit for having exceptional reflexes and hand-eye co-ordination? Sportsmen once hoped to appear effortless. Now they must follow a different ideal. If it isn’t about effort – about blood and guts, sweat and tears – then success doesn’t really count. However absurd, this is how we are told to view success, in sport and in life.

Yet the natural human instinct – what viewers feel before they are told what to think – is to thrill to raw talent whenever we see it. Usain Bolt cheerfully admits that Yohan Blake trains much harder than he does. “But I have a talent,” Bolt adds truthfully. And it is his talent that is so wonderful. He is one of the world’s most popular sportsmen because he has not been dulled by the platitudes of professionalism. He doesn’t pretend that it is torturously difficult being Usain Bolt. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, in the 100 metres final, he stopped trying at 70 metres. In London, he sprinted almost for the full 100 metres. But he has never lost his boyish incredulity at his own brilliance. Nor have we.

This narrative of just deserts has been overlaid with the story of “home-field advantage”. (Team GB has followed the usual trend of host nations by experiencing a bounce in performance.) At times during these Games, interviewing athletes became less about discovering things by talking to the participants and more a device for celebrating the crowd (and, by extension, the viewer). Hence the standard post-triumph interview went something like this: “How many seconds/inches/points did the home crowd give you as an advantage?”

What are the athletes supposed to say? “The crowd gave me an advantage of precisely 0.02 per cent”? But the testimony of athletes, for all their good intentions, cannot be trusted as revealed truth. Professional sportsmen intuitively understand how hard it is to resist “the media line” that has been decided on their behalf in advance. All athletes have to do in most interviews is acquiesce; usually the answers are built into the questions. It would be an unusually brave, perhaps reckless, British Olympian who denied that he or she was “inspired” by the crowd.

It would have been much more powerful if the athletes this year had been given the opportunity to thank the crowd – and the nation – unprompted.

III

For all the success of the London Olympics, one cannot deny that there have been unresolved tensions. The first is the underlying tension between London and the rest of the United Kingdom. No equivalent capital city so disproportionately dominates a nation. That London has shone so brightly may be good for Britain’s self-esteem; but will it reinforce the sense that London is almost another country, an isolated canton that houses the anglophone world’s financial and creative elite? “This is America up here in the Bronx,” Tom Wolfe once wrote. “Manhattan’s an offshore boutique!” Would the Games show London drifting away from the UK in the same way? For that reason, the success of the torch relay across the country was vitally important. No one knew if it would catch the collective imagination. The answer, we learned, was that these would be London’s Games, but not solely London’s Games.

And while the political parties jostle to claim the credit, an uncomfortable logic is left under-explored. Team GB could not have won many of its medals without the support of the state. Only a few sports can nurture elite athletes (and their coaches, equipment and nutritionists) in a free market; most require handouts from the taxpayer.

What of the Olympic legacy? Now that the 2012 Games have succeeded, the focus turns to whether the feeling can last. It is remarkable that, only a year ago, during the riots, London suffered such a severe and self-induced blow. Arguing that a sports tournament could heal the scars from then sounds quixotic, to say the least. The Olympics, however, is no longer really a sports tournament. Sport provides the surface and the pretext; the real point is the opportunity to reboot a city, perhaps even a country.

Olympics sceptics once used that fact as a criticism: look how detached the Games have become from sport, they complained. Yet if the Olympics aren’t about sport, the logic follows that Britain must have succeeded at something much more important. Perhaps we can’t yet be sure exactly what that is. But the prospect of finding out is thrilling.

Ed Smith is a columnist for the New Statesman. His latest book is “Luck: What It Means and Why It Matters (Bloomsbury, £16.99)

edsmith.org.uk

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Tags: Sport olympics

View the discussion thread.

17 comments

Thu, 2012-08-23 10:27 — God help me (not verified)

This pretty much proves my point - search Yahoo for 'Top recruit collapses in court after receiving three-year prison sentence' and watch the video...

Talk about a net burden on society. We, the white majority, are sick to the back teeth of the insane idiots in the media telling us that everything is just wonderful, and that we should be more 'tolerant'. You only tolerate PAIN, not things that you want.
If most whites wanted to live in a 'multicultural' society, then there would be no areas with higher than the national average of non-whites. Of course, reality is quite the reverse - there are hundreds of areas which are now majority non-white, because MOST of the whites moved OUT, and virtually NONE move INTO those areas, solely because they were full of non-whites.

I wonder if the idiots at the New Statesman have an alternative explanation for this phenomenon...

Thu, 2012-08-23 10:06 — God help me (not verified)

Why doesn't Mo Farah want to live in Somalia? Can anyone tell me?
Why is this country more appealing to him than his ancestors' country?

Could it possibly have anything to do with the PEOPLE who live here? Could it possibly have anything to do with the WHITES who built this country?

Aren't there enough whites in Somalia to make it an attractive place to live?

No, it must be something else, since "We're all the same"...

The scum who run the media are going to pay big time when everything collapses - the people, the 99% who DON'T agree with you, know who you are, know every word you've spouted against us for the past 50 years, and you will have nowhere to run when the civil war breaks out. What a bunch of stupid, arrogant idiots you are.

'Multiculturalism' is GENOCIDE of white people. MOST white people don't want it - otherwise you wouldn't have had to FORCE it on us for 50 years. MOST white people don't want it - otherwise millions of whites would be moving into the 'enriched' areas of this country, such as Brixton, Hounslow, Alum Rock, etc. and those areas would never have been able to become so 'enriched' in the first place, would they - if MOST white people wanted to live around foreigners...

Sat, 2012-08-18 17:37 — Tosin (not verified)

I love you for writing this: "Sportsmen once hoped to appear effortless. Now they must follow a different ideal. If it isn’t about effort – about blood and guts, sweat and tears – then success doesn’t really count." Lived in America for a decade where I learned about hardwork. But there is such a thing as too much hard work. It's boring. Nobody should do that. And I love Usain Bolt.

Thu, 2012-08-16 03:02 — Darryl Wheetley (not verified)

Bush announced in late July that he planned to impose a direct tax on expatriate workers' income Sept. 1 to bail the territorial government out of a financial hole and to meet Britain's demand that Cayman diversify its sources of revenue beyond the work permit fees, duties and other fees it now relies on. casquettesenfr.com casquette new era He later said the annual income threshold would be $36,000, which would have affected about 5,870 expatriates. He described it as a "community enhancement fee" rather than a tax.The proposal outraged many people, who said the tax would be discriminatory and could destroy the islands' main economic anchor.

Wed, 2012-08-15 01:53 — Unregisterd Rory (not verified)

"The Games have been most un-British, and most unattractive, when they have been most jingoistic."

I have to admit, I hated all the "Team GB" chanting - reminded me of You-Ess-Ay.

But the boxing made me proud. None of that nonsense. When our boy knocked a Chinese chap to the floor, the crowd started chanting "Who arrrrrrrrr - ya, Who arrrrrrrrr - ya" like we do at the football to remind the opposing donkey that we have no idea who he is, no matter how much he earns, and therefore his life has been an abject failure and he should consider an alternative career.

Then the lads started chanting his name "Josh-you-arrrrr, Josh-you-arrrrr, Josh-you-arrrrr," Made me proud.

Seems the only event where the majority of proper sports fans were at was the boxing. Glad all these first time sports types loved it - the broadsheets of every stripe have been full of journalists who used to think sport was the opium of the masses and/or just for oiks now writing columns about how exciting it was watching their team (GB) win.

(Sod it, I may as well be sexist and point out that female journalist have been over-represented in this Damascene conversion. There's even an article in this issue by one. And I bet they're the sort that took their kids and chanted Team-Gee-Bee all the f*cking time.) The competitors are individuals. It's not hard to chant their names, y'know.

In the Times of India today, Mary Kom (bronze medallist) was talking about her SF defeat to Nicola Adams.........

I was not attacking as much and may be it was the crowd also which was cheering Nicola. I generally don't get affected by how the crowd is behaving but probably in the semifinals, it affected me," she recalled. ............

Welcome to London, luv.

As a British sports fan, I've got used to believing that having the wittiest chants and the best atmosphere is an acceptable substitute for winning. Did you ever watch the England cricket team in the late 90s?

It's all you journalist newbies with your Team GB chants that don't get it.

But only regret is that the Chinese boxer wouldn't have understood "Who are ya". Perhaps we should have learned Mandarin. And when your team's conceded an equaliser, silencing 70,000 of you so all you can hear is 3,000 Swedes singing "You're not singing any more" at you in English, you'll realise how devastating that can be.

As I have smatterings of most of the other European colonial languages, I might brush up on my Mandarin and Korean and go to Rio. What's Portuguese for "you're sh*t and you know you are?"

Tue, 2012-08-14 08:20 — hugh markey (not verified)

Gee, everyone's a winner!

Snake Oil Salesman

Tue, 2012-08-14 07:27 — Oyako paul (not verified)

His spirit is very admirable.
Life to the pursuit of Olympic athletes put into, regardless of injury, no matter how hard, always adhere to, it is worth learning for all

Sun, 2012-08-12 19:47 — gabriel 9 (not verified)

Not much has changed in 2000 years

For the Romans, it was "bread and games" ...

Now we have lavish corporate and tax payer funded opening ceremonies and
the winning of gold medals by 'national' teams, and wrapping ourselves in
the 'flag' every four years to distract the masses from the daily grind
and misery of the modern world.

No doubt in the next weeks, and during the party conference season
politicians will pontificate about the lasting 'benefits' of the London
Olympics...

Sun, 2012-08-12 18:49 — hugh markey (not verified)

Who's that in the frame with MO? Well, it's either the PM or the Mayor. Talking about Boris - oh, if only we could stuff his mouth with gold - where has the bally blighter gone? It's a microsecond since he's had his picture took. Getting as bad as Beckham

Photogenic Parasites

Sun, 2012-08-12 17:11 — Eddy S (not verified)

there's going to be the inevitable seen of politicians trying to take credit. you can thank tony blair, lord coe, cameron (for doubling the opening ceremony budget - during hard times).

however the national lottery has changed the dynamics of arts and sports. however we need to see other large infrastructure investments - i would like to see HS2 started this year not just talked about and kicked into the long grass. We can start this from the north and it would be great. I would like to see a new super airport that competes with china and integrated with flood systems, super high speed broadband backbones, sewage systems and high speed rail.

the olympics has shown we can do this projects.