Competition | 4 October 2008

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition

In Competition No. 2564 you were invited to submit a feature looking back at the Olympic Games written in the overblown style of a sportswriter with literary pretensions.

High-brow followers of football are nothing new. And these days, as people flit increasingly freely between high and low culture, there is nothing unusual about the sight of a fan leafing through a volume of Barthes during half-time at Millwall. But the spectre of Pseuds Corner hovers over the sports pages and some writers can’t resist spicing up their prose with wince-inducing metaphors and clunking literary allusions. There are some fine examples from this week’s deserving winners, who are rewarded with £25 each. And step up to the podium, gold-medal-winner Basil Ransome-Davies, worthy recipient of the bonus fiver for a magnificently pretentious piece of tosh.

Finally, thanks to James Young for his stewardship of this column and thank you to those who sent me good wishes.

George Santayana observed that life is neither a spectacle nor a feast but a predicament, while the Situationists diagnosed the ‘society of the spectacle’ as a hegemonic mirror-maze of mystifying distractions. Sport, occupying a volatile space between sociology and metaphysics, aesthetics and pharmacology, necessarily adopts the ritualistic forms of the spectacle as the overt and conclusive sign of its contract with the public, thus framing its ethical codes within the more contentious structures of politics. Can it ever transcend this potentially fatal association? Beijing has shown that it can — not in the lavish uniformity of its drumming hordes or even in the crude calculus of record-breaking performances, but in epiphanies such as the heart-stopping valour of Paula Radcliffe, whose failure created a moment as mysteriously but unarguably perfect as crystals of dew on a rose or the plangent afterglow one feels after reading a Shakespearean sonnet.