Irascible Insights

The London Olympics 2012

Now that the incessant hyperbole surrounding the 2012 London Olympics has finally dissipated it's time for an alternative view of some of its more cringe-making manifestations.

I'm sure that for many participants the games were an inspiring and genuinely memorable experience. What has made them memorable for some, has of course, also made them nauseatingly sycophantic for others.

The spectacle of the BBC's commentary team attempting to inject extra emotion into what was an already a highly charged atmosphere of excessive emoting was both embarrassing and puerile. When interviewing the mostly successful performers they acted like a baying mob of ravenous emotional vampires. They fed vicariously upon the sweat, euphoria, tears, and disappointments of each participant, receiving succour from each triumph or disaster like junkies desperate for their next emotional fix. Their continual attempts to wring every last drop of potential feeling from every situation was both crass and unedifying.

It the pinnacle of inanity to ask a medal winner how they are feeling. Every person with a mental age above six years, has an excellent grasp of how a winner might be feeling in the circumstances of just having beaten the competition.

Also, the avalanche of adjectives which greeted every performance, loaded words with a weight they were never designed to bear.  The BBC commentary team all need to take a more careful note of the specific meaning of words. It is clearly not 'unbelievalbe' when one skinny athlete runs slightly faster than a whole bunch of other skinny athletes. Not even if they achieve this feat twice in the same week. What is certainly unbelievable however, is the assertion that such achievements are in someway due to assistance from Allah.

As for the opening and closing ceremonies, the least said the better. I only wish to observe that as an Englishman most of the opening ceremony was incomprehensible and the closing ceremony an embarrassment of ageing rock stars with uninspiring song choices.

I am grateful that this expensive spectacle of sporting and national tribalism is finally over and that its next appearance will not occur here again within my remaining lifetime.