Bring on the dancing horses

The Olympic Games haven’t grabbed me yet. Certainly not in the way the London games of 2012 did. Perhaps the clue is in the words ‘London games’, which were mainly in London but also in places like Weymouth. And because it was a ‘home’ Olympics, we quickly latched onto the British stars like Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis. In fact, because of her brilliance as an athlete, her vibrant personality and, let’s be brutally honest, Ennis’s sheer beauty saw her as the face of the games.

The crowds helped, for sure, and millions of us found ourselves glued to sports like Archery and Horse Dancing, revealing expertise we never knew existed. This time, for me, it’s not the same yet. I’m barely watching the TV coverage and I can’t get my head around the radio coverage of the aforementioned Horse Dancing with BBC cricket correspondent Jonathan ‘Aggers’ Agnew and cyclist Victoria Pendleton in the commentary box. Or anything else, really.

I awoke to the sound of Taekwondo on the radio and vaguely became interested in a ‘British-person-is-doing-well’ kind of way. The commentary made no sense to someone as ignorant of the sport as me, as contestants were avoided points and penalty points, challenges to decisions were made by some kind of martial arts VAR and eventually the British competitor lost with literally a second to go. ‘Sod it,’ I said, not even knowing the sex of the fighter (I now know it was a woman) and within a few seconds Aggers was talking about the dancing horses.

My feeling is that when the athletics part begins, I’ll get interested. The absence of crowds at the football last season ruined my enjoyment of televised matches, although I have to confess that Sky’s coverage of the British Lions rugby union victory against South Africa was so clever – essentially, the camera angles were so good, the fake crowd noise sounded real – I found myself fairly engaged with the action, if not the emotion. If the Japanese TV directors can fill the stadium with thousands of mannequins seized from shops windows and crank up the volume,I might yet find myself shouting at the TV.

At least I can now watch the games with a lesser feeling of guilt now that it seems the host population appears to be embracing the games after initially showing great scepticism as to how they could go ahead with Covid wildly out of control.

Sadly, the BBC has lost control of the Olympic TV rights to show everything and anything, hence much of what folk are watching are pre-recorded segments and sometimes just highlights and that can’t help in terms of continuity. The shared national experiences of great achievements will now be, in many instances, a thing of the past. What we have is probably better than nothing, although at the moment nothing is what I am watching, especially when the Horse Dancing is on.