London 2012 - Synchronized Swimming, Archery, Dressage and Darts

Don't get me wrong. I love synchronized swimming. Or Dancing Under Adverse Weather Conditions as it's called in our house. It has to be the funniest of all the Olympic events. And the participants all seem to have mastered that comedic strategy so perfectly exemplified by Margaret Dumont, the fat lady in all the Marx Brothers movies. Sometimes it's funnier when you play it straight.

I love all the comedy events.

I mean, I love Dressage.

That's the one where they get horses to do all those cute tricks that only dogs normally do. Like walking backwards, rolling over, sit up and beg. Like that.

I also love that fact that there is a sport so expensive to take part in that it's dominated by oil sheiks and the British Royal Family.

And the endurance walking is, of course, hilarious. Who thought that up?

'OK. They have to go as fast as they can. Obviously. But here's the thing. If they accidentally break into a run. They're disqualified.' Genius.

And the rowing. It relies on the one visual gag but, for me anyway, it never gets old. Usually in sports, the littlest guys run inconceivably long distances and the biggest guys lift unfeasibly heavy weights. And never the twain shall meet. But with rowing they came up with a sport where you need eight giants and a midget. Eight guys with big strong backs and thighs to do the rowing and one little guy with a megaphone to keep the beat and get them pointed in the right direction. I mean if they want to minimize the weight why don't they just use one of the girl gymnasts on her day off. Or go the whole hog and hire a dwarf.

The funniest bit is when the winning team line up to get their medals. They don't know what to do with the little guy. Put him at the front? At the back? Or they can try to lose him in the middle somewhere. I think one of the big guys should just tuck him under his arm.

But to get back to the synchronized swimming. They reason I brought it up is, how did it get to be an Olympic Sport? I mean it's not like they needed another swimming event. We all know that if somebody comes back from the Games with a double fistful of medals, they didn't do it without shaving their body hair and getting wet.

I suppose it's a fusion sport. Swimming, dancing and gymnastics. But that's no excuse. I can imagine a very entertaining beach-volleyball/wrestling mash-up. I only have to figure out the rules and I'm good to go. But I'd have to get sponsorship and funding and set up a league and... oh, never mind.

Synchronized swimming has a history though, back when it was known as water ballet. Maybe that's the thing. Is the reason Archery is in but Darts is out simply an issue of tradition?

I mean Archery has an ancient tradition in Britain. In some parts of the world the rudest hand signal is the raising of the single middle finger in the time-honored digitus impudicus, in others the thumb holds down the middle two fingers and flaunts the pinky and index finger as the horns of devil or cuckold, in some cultures a ring is made of the curled thumb and index fingers to mimic the distended arsehole of one who submits to sodomitical intercourse. Make of that what you will. Only Britain uses the manual insult where the index and middle fingers are raised in a backhanded spread V-sign. The story is that prior to the Battle of Agincourt of 1415 the French had threatened that captured archers would have their bow fingers amputated. After the English victory their archers are said to have waved their intact fingers to taunt the defeated French. The gesture remained.

In the early seventeenth century James the First issued a proclamation which would become known as the Declaration of Sports. In it he condemns 'Puritans and other precise persons' for interfering with the free practice of 'lawful sports' on a Sunday afternoon after church services. I'm not altogether sure what he means there by 'precise persons' but I suspect they are still around. They sound like the kind of people who police spelling and grammar on the YouTube comment feature. In any case, one of the few 'lawful sports' to be singled out by name is, of course, archery. Towns and villages had places set aside for the practice of this martial sport. This area was known as the butts. Yeah, try googling that to find out about archery.

It would be nice to be able to say that these ancient practices are conserved in place names like Newington Butts in south London. But a butt is also the name of any left over, off-cut bit of a field so often that was preserved in the name. There's no evidence that there was ever any archery at Newington Butts so if your tour guide tells you any different they're full of shit. In fact, if your tour guide takes you so far into South London that you can't see the river then your travel insurance is probably no longer valid.

Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. Archery gets in because of its long and illustrious tradition but Darts doesn't. Even though Darts is just indoor archery. They both require a high level of hand/eye coordination and use of the muscles of arm and shoulder. I mean what does Archery have that Darts doesn't? Even the arithmetic is harder. You have to be able to count backwards and multiply by two and three. Not that I'm suggesting that arithmetic is a sport. But if getting a horse to roll over and show it's belly is, why the fuck not?

During the 2012 Olympics the archery competitions will take place in Lord's Cricket Ground in St John's Wood. That's just north west of Regent's Park. Seriously posh London. Average house price two million quid. What?

'Now your mother she's an heiress, owns a block in St John's Wood. And your father'd be there with her. If he only could. But don't play with me 'cos you're playing with fire.'

Anyway, if you want to see a game of darts you're going to have to go to the pub.

But would you even see one there? I can't remember the last time I saw a dart board in a pub. Certainly not in any of the civilized areas of London. No financially competent gastro-pub is going to sacrifice the space of three paying tables to make room for the oche. Pub dart boards, I'm afraid, have already gone the way of the village butts.

Now we're truly ancient, can we be in the Olympics, please?

Greenwich, George Melly and the London Olympics 2012

Greenwich is home to the Royal Navy. The wide riverside facade of the Christopher Wren designed Royal Naval College has been greeted with fond relief by generations of homecoming sailors. It is both symbol and engine of a long seafaring tradition.

Who knows how many hundreds of books have been written about the Senior Service. Many readers will have their favorites. Maybe a biography of Admiral Lord Nelson or one of C S Forester's Horatio Hornblower novels. Mine is a wonderfully rumbustious memoir of an Able Seamen who served at the tail end of World War Two and through the early months of the peace.

George Melly never saw active service and never knowingly committed an act of bravery or self-sacrifice. But his book, 'Rum, Bum and Concertina', records that he did have a lot of fun. He spent most of his brief naval career on punishment duties or running up to London to hang out with the surrealist painters and poets among the refugees of the Parisian art world who had made their temporary home there, or having illicit sex with his comrades in the nooks and crannies of various of Her Majesty's Ships of the Line.

Not long after I read this book I was regaling some fellow dinner party guests with stories from it. When I concluded that the Navy sounded like a big gay love jamboree a rather tight lipped young man at the other end of the table said, 'Not on my watch, it isn't.'

Ooh er!

Notwithstanding George Melly's extra-curricular activities, the Royal Navy was a hugely successful organization and at one time policed the biggest land empire the world has ever known. When Queen Victoria was, as Leonard Cohen has it, 'stern governess of all those huge pink maps', Britain did indeed rule the waves.

So it made sense, when an international conference met in Washington D.C. In 1884, to agree on a Prime Meridian, a line of 0° longitude, that the British standard was chosen. And the British line goes through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Not that there weren't competitors. At various time there were meridians defined that passed through Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Warsaw, Jerusalem and Antwerp among many other cities. There was one in Kyoto. In the United States, Philadelphia had one and Washington D.C. itself had another. Mecca had one.

But in 1884 , according to Wikipedia, 'over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage used it (Greenwich) as the reference meridian on their maps'. So Greenwich got the gig. And has it for the foreseeable future.

Although, there is currently an Islamic movement for Mecca to be the Prime Meridian. To this end the world's largest clock has been built and on 11 August 2010 (1 Ramadan, AH 1431) it was started up in that city. We'll see.

Despite the maritime associations of Greenwich it won't be the venue for any sailing or boating events during the Olympic Games. However, Greenwich Park, which occupies the ground between The Royal Observatory at the top of Greenwich Hill and The Old Royal Naval College at the bottom, will host the Olympic and Paralympic Equestrian competitions and the running and shooting section of the Modern Pentathlon.

A temporary Cross Country course will be laid out in the Park and a temporary arena will built within the grounds of the National Maritime Museum there. It's not clear at the moment which of these will be in the western hemisphere and which in the eastern.

Benjamin Franklin and the London Olympics 2012

A few years ago an American friend of mine returned home after six months in Europe. In remembrance of her trip she put a poster map of her favorite European city on her office wall. The boss squinted at it. 'What is that thing?'

Katie looked at him. It had the name across the top. 'London,' she said.

'Yeah, I know. But what's that wiggly thing going all the way across?' What was he talking about? She looked at the map again. Oh, right. 'That's the River Thames.'

Katie's boss didn't get it. Atlanta, Georgia, where he had been born and raised, grew up around the railroads, and Peachtree Creek had long disappeared underground. 'They have a river running right through the city?'

Yep. They have a river running right through it. In fact the river is pretty much the reason why the city is there in the first place. When the Roman Army under Julius Caesar was marching north after the invasion of 43 AD, the Thames, running from east to west across the width of the country, was their first serious geographical obstacle.

A bridge was built, a garrison was stationed and a community flourished around it. Londinium was born.

Two thousand years later the river has a rich sporting history and a living sporting tradition.

Now and again I take a morning run along the Thames in west London. My route follows the river from Mortlake to Putney, reversing the course of the annual Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. If I am out early enough there might be a slight chill in the air and a light mist on the water. This is a stretch of the river with boating clubs on both the north and south banks. The dull rattle of rowlocks, the slap of sculls and the megaphone of a cox will sound along the river from a keen pre-commuting crew. If it is term time a couple of boats will be out from St Paul's School which is right there at the south end of Hammersmith Bridge.

If it's a long run I might go further east towards Chelsea which, three hundred years ago, saw an early exhibition of the new sport of swimming.

In 1726 London was the world center of the printing industry and the young American was learning the trade at one of the many print shops in the City of London. But that day was a holiday and he had fled upriver, away from the crowding and the industry and the stink of the city. What is now west London was then a landscape of meadows and marshes and country houses and little villages with a sophisticated and wealthy population.

Maybe the young American was showing off to his rich friends, maybe it was youthful exuberance or that thrill you feel in a fit and healthy body that just has to express itself in action, maybe as a teetotaller he was simply bored by the boozing Brits, but at some point he stripped off and dived from the boat into the water.

He was a keen swimmer and knew what he was about. He had read Melchisedech Thevenot's 1696 book The Art of Swimming and, in his own words, 'had from a child ever been delighted with this exercise, had studied and practis'd all Thevenot's motions and positions, added some of my own, aiming at the graceful and easy as well as the useful.'

The Thames is a strong tidal river. Nowadays, in central London, the river rises and falls by about twenty two feet and the tide and currents can run dangerously fast. I'm guessing that the tide was on its way out when the American jumped in. He wouldn't want to be swimming against it. Having been in town for almost a year and a half and he would have learned the river's habits by that time. This was also before the building of the embankments, which didn't come till the nineteenth century, so the river would have been somewhat wider and slower on that day in the seventeen hundreds.

In any case, everybody had a good time. The boaters followed the youngster all the way from Chelsea through Westminster to Blackfriars, the better part of five miles. On the way he entertained them with 'many feats of activity, both upon and under the water, that surpris'd and pleas'd those to whom they were novelties.'

The sport had to stop before they reached the perilous currents at London Bridge and when he got out of the water and shook the water from his long hair Benjamin Franklin must have been wonderfully exhausted and awash with endorphins.

His demonstration had been a great success. Off the back of it he was offered the job of swimming teacher to the sons of a wealthy aristocrat and if his plans for returning to America had not been so far advanced he might have taken the gig and had a successful career as a personal trainer to the British nobility.

It's anybody's guess whose face would have ended up on the hundred dollar bill then.

Nowadays if you see somebody jumping into the Thames in London the odds are it's a drunk or a suicide. So the Olympic swimming and diving events will be taking place elsewhere.

Not that that would always have been the case. The first few of the modern Olympics had the swimming events in open water. In the 1900 Paris Olympics, for example, they took place in the river Seine.

But today's pool-accustomed athletes don't expect to be treading river weed. The Freestyle, Breaststroke, Backstroke and Butterfly, which Ben Franklin so ably demonstrated that day in 1762, in all their various solos and relays and medleys, will be seen in the specially built Aquatics Centre at the new Olympic Park in Stratford in east London. This is also where the Paralympic Swimming, the Diving and the Synchronised Swimming will be held, and the swimming bits of the Modern Pentathlon.

But here's the good news. I mean the really good news. If you want to see an open air Olympic swimming event in historic London, you can. Because the 10K Marathon Swimming event will take place in the Serpentine Pond in Hyde Park.

The Serpentine Pond, a dammed section of the now mostly underground Westbourne River, a tributary of the River Thames, may be home to wild swans, ducks, geese, the odd pelican and, allegedly, poisonous algae, but, come August, the world's elite endurance swimmers will be competing in it's waters for the glory of Olympic Gold.

Is that cool. Or what?

Ben Franklin would have loved it.

Resolution Running

My limbs are rubber and my breath comes like treacle. I'm running like a fucking fish.

Two and a half years ago I could run a hundred miles a week. More. I was hard and fast and lean and mean. I was a middle-aged motherfucking running machine.

Now I'm gasping like a gut-punched pensioner.

The doubt started when I opened the front door at nine thirty this morning on the second day of the year 2012 of the Common Era. It was cold. I went back upstairs and changed into a long sleeved top. Back downstairs I sat on the front step pulling on my running shoes and wondering if I should go inside again and fetch gloves.

Forget the gloves. Get going.

There's only one way to do this. Run slow. I know. It's obvious. I channel George Sheehan. Find the pace at which you could run forever. Forever? You're joking, right?

But I do it.

I make my steps as short as my breath. The old man shuffle.

Trying not to look like a new-year-resolution runner.

Don't kid yourself, buddy. That is exactly what you are.