Harry Pearson On Saturday I met a man from Ashington who recently moved to Portobello in Edinburgh. He said the first week he was up in Scotland, he was chatting to a local woman he’d met at his running club. By way of introducing him to the area she listed the many celebrities who come from Portobello – including Gail Porter. “Does anyone famous come from Ashington?” she asked. “Jackie Charlton,” the man replied. The woman’s eyes widened with amazement. “What,” she exclaimed excitedly, “that bloke from the kung fu films?” Many of you may feel this was simply a mix- up on the woman’s part. Possibly so, though personally I like to think that she may well have been right. That somewhere on Earth there is a place where people watch movies featuring a craggy figure in a Barbour jacket taming the Hong Kong triads with nothing more than a flat-cap, a fishing rod and no-nonsense common sense, while Jackie Chan focuses a mind honed to razor sharpness by years of martial arts training on trying to remember who, or what, Tony Cascarino is. After a couple of days watching the Olympic Games such a world is certainly a good deal easier to imagine. Because while the Sydney Olympiad may initially look like our planet, once the camera zooms in we see that it is actually more like something brewed up in the febrile mind of David Lynch.
It is a bizarre alternative world: a place where one spectator at a football match feels moved to hold up a banner reading “Aussies love women”, Bulgaria sells bulk orders of weightlifters to a Gulf state and men wearing blinkers expend hundreds of rounds of ammunition shooting pigeons manufactured from clay, while 50m away dozens of real plump-bodied pigeons are cavorting about doing everything they can to attract their attention bar wearing T- shirts with “eat me” printed on the front. Older readers may remember the late Marty Feldman, a bug-eyed comedian of some brilliance. One of Feldman’s most famous sketches saw him rise in the middle of the night from beside his sleeping wife, run for many miles, swim across a lake, ride a bicycle over a mountain, leap into a taxi and then board a jet aircraft in order to jump into another bed with a young woman in a negligee. After a few seconds of wrestling with this vision in bri-nylon, Feldman returned to his wife via the same arduous route. Not much to inspire a new sports event there, you might think. Yet in the Charlton/ Chan world of the Olympics, this masterpiece of surreal comedy has been recreated in the form of the triathlon. In the interests of time and changing sexual attitudes the organisers have dropped the taxi, aircraft and dolly bird element but, in a whimsical touch of which the frizzy- haired comic would surely have approved, have decreed that the male competitors must complete the running section of the event wearing bikinis. In the gymnastics arena, meanwhile, the Olympic ideal of peace, fraternity and international oddness is upheld by a group of female competitors who, in a Charlton/Chan moment, have come to believe that Tonya Harding is the world’s most fashionable woman. In tribute to their idol, they wear the kind of dramatic pancake make-up normally only seen in adverts for Lithuanian lap- dancing clubs and grin manically – not, one suspects, from any sense of joy but because their hair is scraped back so severely they can’t relax their facial muscles. In the Olympic commentary box the word “rep^chage” is bandied about as if it were as common in everyday use as “I”, “and” or “thattossermellor”.
A peek in the dictionary shows that it is French and means “the race for second- bests”. In true Charlton/Chan style there is no English equivalent, despite all the millions of opportunities we have had down the years to come up with one. Elsewhere the yachtsmen wear underpants over their wetsuits, someone called Pippa Funnell does well in the dressage – a sport which involves teaching horses to fox-trot – and a bloke with size 17 feet chooses to swim up and down the pool rather than simply running across the surface like a lizard.
The human mind is incredibly adaptable. After a few hours in Charlton/Chan world your brain has started to accept even the most extraordinary things as perfectly normal. To those of us who spent most of Sunday watching the Olympics, the moment in the evening when Steve Cram referred to the president of the International Olympic Committee as “San” Antonio Samaranch hardly raised a flicker of doubt. By that stage the notion that the pope might have sanctified the grizzled Spanish hypocrite while he was still living seemed no less credible than the idea that the former track star had just fluffed his autocue reading again.