The Olympics have been creeping up on us through the forest of top-class sport this summer. But now they’re here, the third time the summer Games have been held in Paris. The first was in 1900, and reflect what a very different place the world was then. There were old favourites such as track and field athletics and cycling, but less probably croquet, firefighting and fishing and – one to scare the pants off the woke warriors of today – live pigeon shooting, making its one and only appearance at the five-ringed circus.
Indeed an Olympic historian, reflecting on the fate of the luckless pigeons, said: ‘This disgusting event marked the only time in Olympic history when animals were killed on purpose.’ Nearly 300 birds met their maker, and a prize of up to 20,000 francs was awarded to the winners.
Breakdancing would seem pretty nuts if you tried to explain it to the Olympians
of 1900
More than a century later, skateboarding and breakdancing – known as ‘breaking’ – are making their Olympic debuts. And pretty nuts they would seem, too, if you had tried to explain them to the Olympians of 1900.
If I had to choose just one event, it would be the women’s 800 metres, where Britain’s latest shining track star, Keely Hodgkinson, roared into form with an astounding performance at the weekend. Her time of one minute and 54.61 seconds was a personal best by a margin, and the fastest since Caster Semenya in 2018. It was also the sixth fastest ever. She is sharp, warm, funny and clever – as well as absurdly personable – and should be with us for many years both on the track and on our TV screens. And if she doesn’t come away with gold, the world will be beyond salvation.
The one big absence is the cycling megastar Tadej Pogacar, the flying Slovenian who is probably the best all-round athlete in the world. Pogacar pulled out of the Olympic road race on the grounds that he was a bit knackered, which was probably the understatement of the century. He has just smashed the Tour de France, the most gruelling sporting challenge on the planet, winning the yellow jersey for the third time, and taking six stages while he was at it, obliterating such fine riders as Remco Evene-poel and Jonas Vingegaard. It’s the first time this century that anyone has completed the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France double in the same year. Pogacar won the Giro by nearly ten minutes and could have led the Tour by the same margin had he not eased off a few times, just a boy racer enjoying himself too much.
The last man to do the double was the Italian Marco Pantani in 1998, but that didn’t end too well. More specifically, it ended a few years later in a locked hotel room in Rimini, where Pantani had barricaded himself away from friends and family and killed himself with a massive overdose of cocaine. If there are any certainties in sport, it is that nothing like that will happen to the ebullient Pogacar. There are always questions, though – not least on the Plateau de Beille mountain finish in the Pyrenees this year, where he set a new climbing record, beating Pantani’s 1998 time by nearly four minutes, a scarcely believable time up such a ferocious ascent.
Pogacar just laughs off the cynics. He says the intense rivalry between his team and Vingegaard’s inspired innovation. ‘Every team is pushing each other, with technology, with nutrition, with training plans, with altitude camps. We push each other to reach new limits.’ Then there’s all the technological advances. ‘The bikes are now so much faster, especially the tyres,’ says Pogacar. ‘They make the biggest difference from what we had six, ten years ago. The wheels, the aerodynamics, the frames – it’s amazing how different the bike is now.’
See, it’s simple. Plus it helps if you’re the greatest rider in the world. We will miss you Tadej in Paris.
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