Sport Comment: Glorious, random and a breath of fresh air
EVEN if your diet consists solely of the best caviar, after a while you crave a burger. If your sporting interests revolve only around Wenger and Mourinho, or England against Ireland, occasionally you need to savour something less mainstream and more esoteric.
That has been the Sochi Olympics. If you missed them, you missed out. Random and gloriously absurd in equal measure. A singing Mexican prince who’s released eight albums tumbling in the slalom, Vanessa Mae deciding the Games would provide her with a chance to improve her skiing (can we all enter the next one on that basis?), enough failed drugs tests to make people in this country realise that biathlon and related sports are taken all too seriously by some competing individuals and nations, and of course, the curling. Daytime television has never been so compelling. As one of our finest middle-distance runners, surely nothing in Steve Cram’s CV will surpass his brilliant commentary on our two medals in the Ice Cube.
And these have been our best Winter Games since the 1920s, although as comparisons go, that is about as meaningless as it gets. We won skeleton gold on a funding budget of £3.4m. How that is justifiable when basketball, an inner-city sport accessible to millions, gets zero, is beyond me. But like many things in Sochi over the past week or two, it’s made no sense, so don’t try to rationalise it. Just accept and enjoy.
You can sneer if you want to at the Winter Olympics, but you can’t say they’re not different and a welcome breath of fresh air. Arsene and Jose will doubtless continue their tedious spat week-in, week-out through until the next Games in Korea. But here’s the good news: you’ll have curling over breakfast in 2018. Bet you’re counting the days already.