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.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Do not be seduced into thinking of the Games — with their misty conflation of Olympus and Olympia, of gods and of gold — as something Wagnerian, a Five-Ring Cycle staged periodically for aficionados at ruinous expense. See them rather as a laying bare of the deepest roots of humankind, a ritualised evocation of — there is no other word — primevality. In the biblical beginning was the Word. But the Games re-embody a time beyond that beginning, before language itself, when citius, altius, fortius translated into life or death, and breath was too precious to waste on speech. All athletes, whatever their discipline, are mute in their performance. Physicality is everything, articulation merely a matter of moving limbs. The Olympics are truly The Greatest Dumbshow on Earth. Only later do we writers, the heirs of Pindar, give resonance to these silent deeds and clothe their nakedness in the many-coloured fabric of our prose.
W.J. Webster
Is life a metaphor for sport or vice versa? The question gave pause to Beckett and Pinter, but the Chinese Olympiad both answered it and rendered the point moot, showcasing physical strength and mental courage as they laboured in tandem to seem — and thereby perhaps become — indistinguishable. The Chinese, topping the medal table, demonstrated that to outnumber is at least in countless senses to outperform, while not detracting one iota from the literally superhuman efforts of those unfit to equal them. On track, in field, in pool, motion became poetry, though thankfully less Motion’s poetry than Petrarch’s. Here, heroes fit for Beowulf trounced failures William Trevor could not humanise while a television audience of countless billions gawped on like validating if complacent deities. The Wildean paradox underpinning it all is that sport exists exclusively to amuse the spectator incapable of playing it.
Adrian Fry
Under the new blue skies of Beijing, and with a Bolt out of the blue, too, the games were up, up and far away greater than its detractors had feared. The gloom-mongers (let us call them ‘the heebie-GBs’) in our own backyard are already vamoosing to the velodromes, adopting the principle ‘two wheels good, four wheels bad’. There were few cuckoos in the Bird’s Nest, and plenty of golden eggs. Out at Qingdao, our crafty mariners, as plucky as their counterparts at Dunkirk, were like Whitman’s ‘lustrous stars’ — braving the waves, and rescuing our reputations. Ohuruogu flew; and so did the Union Jack, dimpling in the Chinese breeze. Not since Gordon overthrew the Taiping rebellion has Britain been so vindicated — and although our modern-day Gordon is heading for a Khartoum of a different description, even he must have cracked a cheer as we left Australian hopes in — what else? — ashes.
Bill Greenwell
Oft have they travelled in the realms of gold, those golden lads and girls, and come, not to dust but to glory. Triumphant on two wheels, the great Hoy and his athletic followers pedalled their two-wheeled steeds to victory. On four legs our riders turned to burnished bronze. There were archers with bows of burning gold; sailors, fourfold gilded, mastering winds and waves; oarsmen, true and worthy descendants of the Argonauts; silver-finned swimmers streaking like lightning through their blue element; sprinters straining like greyhounds at the slips. We gazed in wonder at the paradigmatic pageantry of that prolusion in the memorably shaped and named Bird’s Nest Stadium: the thronging thousands, brilliantly caparisoned; the frenzied fireworks; Chinoiserie par excellence. Contestants from this blessed isle truly did reach the summit of Beijing’s Mount Olympus to triumph with the gods. We lesser mortals can only bow down and worship.
Alanna Blake
Following Dr Johnson’s precepts, we have surveyed mankind from China to Peru and found it as glorious as the Orient wherein the ancient Olympic games were brought dancing and drumming into the 21st century. O brave new world! we cry, marvelling at the cornucopia of riches, the multitudinous heroics, a phantasmagoria where everyone is a winner. Olympic fever brings its Midas touch even to the mundane, from the silken ripples in the swimming pool to the shimmering dust on the tracks. Horace, had he been alive, would have rewritten his famous Ode as AMO profanum vulgus; Hamlet, had he watched athletes outperform art, would still have exclaimed What a piece of work is man! and found eternal delights in such contemplation. O laureates, winners of the olive crowns and garlanded with bay, how glittering are your triumphs, how golden your victories. Dulce et decorum est pro patria: glory!
D.A. Prince
No. 2567: Gizza job
You are invited to submit a letter of application for a job of your choosing (150 words maximum) written by a character from a novel or poem who would appear to be a very unpromising candidate (e.g., Fagin applying to be a child welfare officer). Entries to ‘Competition 2567’ by 16 October or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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