I Walk The Line

I complete the Olympic 100m every morning. I cross the finish line, which is painted there on the pavement for prosterity.

In 1908 White City was the meeting place of highly trained individuals who were the best in the world at what they do. Now it’s a BBC office.

But back in 1908, Team GB won 146 medals, and more golds than any other type, too. I don’t think you’ll ever see that again, because the events at that Olympiad were mostly things that Brits are good at, like standing in queues, complaining to your friends but not the management, hating the French and progressive rock.

Not really – but they were skewed in our favour, with sports like rugby and rackets. The UK won gold, silver and bronze in that.

And Tug Of War. The tug of war gold medal was taken by City of London Police, silver by Liverpool Police and bronze by Metropolitan “K” Division Police.

I bet the Chinese commentators were going:

“The way I see it, Bob is that we don’t instill the same competitive values in our kids. We don’t nurture talent like they do in children in Britain. Go to any village fete in the UK and you see kids playing tug of war. They really want to be tug of warrists. You walk down the street in Peking and you’ve got kids doing gymnastics. While the British children are knocking back crisps and constructively using the weight to pull each other over, our lot are doing stretches and aerobics. We just don’t have those competitive sporting values. We need to look at sport from a grass roots level.”

“That’s right Dave.”

At the bottom of the table, there was Bohemia with just two bronze medals in fencing. Since I don’t get any blog traffic from Bohemia, I had to look up where it is. Or was, because it isn’t there anymore.

For all I know, that might have been its finest hour, and I’m sorry Bohemia didn’t get a gold. It would have been a proud moment for them, the athlete standing there on the podium, a tear in the eye, the flag waving, “I see a little sil-hou-ETTO of a man…” Beautiful.