For those who continue to bleat about unfair domination in sport, I have four letters: USSR.
Once, in a time called The Eighties, when a Ferrari was something driven by Thomas Magnum PI and Australian cricket was a howling wasteland of mullets and Village People moustaches, the Soviet Union ruled half the world.
Its athletes, potato-faced monsters captured at birth by the KGB and raised on a diet of rusty iron slabs marinated in petrol, confounded doping experts and gynaecologists from Mexico City to Moscow. They were impossibly fast, impossibly strong and impossibly ugly. Soviet television was perpetually blurred for a reason: any close-ups would have induced national hysteria, leading to nausea, disorientation and finally death.
History has been unkind to the hard-working Soviet television producer who has slipped into the shadow of anonymity unlike, for instance, Russian biochemical engineers who all learned Afrikaans and moved south. But that was until last Friday night. Now we know where all Russia’s television experts are. They are working for SABC2’s sports desk.
The national broadcaster’s usual Friday night fare of wholesale slaughter was gone. In its place was something called the Presidential Sports Awards. Naturally one eagerly awaited the chance to see the president presented with award after award for achievements in a variety of Presidential Sports: Eyebrow Beetling, Laborious Joke Telling, Prisoner Pardoning, Virus Vanishing. But it was not to be.
Over a soundtrack lifted straight from a Ukrainian porno film the presenter — a man with a deep inability to understand the workings of a tie — told us that we could expect some ‘great spectacular moments”. These, it turned out,
were endless scenes of anonymous people shuffling into a stuffy marquee, blinking into Gulag spotlights and trying to wrangle enormous ball gowns into place, rather like trying to park the Queen Mary in a Porta Pool.
The skin-flick muzak bumped and ground on and on until finally the president trundled into view towing a blimp that turned out to be Minister of Sports and Recreation Ngconde Balfour. President Thabo Mbeki, groomed and gleaming as a Caramello Bear with his condensed milk cousin at his side, should have been the star attraction, but Yuri in his production van outside had other ideas, focusing his cameras on empty tables, someone’s hat, and a very nervous lady who turned out to be the mistress of ceremonies.
Apparently Yuri was also in charge of putting together the patriotic montage that flickered across our screens while the Soweto String Quartet sawed and butchered its way through the unsuspecting national anthems. The flag flapping over Madiba’s beaming features was fair enough, but suddenly it all went to hell: there were helicopters, someone watering plants, a very white girl on a very white beach, a factory. Yuri, it seemed, was missing his family on the shores of Lake Baikal. Before we could get to tractor races and games with birch branches in saunas, the montage was over and the MC was inviting the ‘face of South Africa sport” to open the proceedings.
If Balfour’s face is that of South African sport, does it imply that his body is likewise the incarnation of the national pastime? That might explain why we can’t win anything. Unfortunately we didn’t get to watch the face that launched a thousand quips for long, as Yuri, dreaming of potatoes, silenced him in mid-platitude. The MC, restraining herself with a great effort from turning into a blob of sycophantic jelly, called on ‘the big man himself”, and Mbeki slapped down Balfour and rose to his feet.
What he said will remain a mystery, for as he began to speak Yuri focused on Herschelle Gibbs, crouching furtively over some hors d’oevres. Gibbs’s outfit — a shirt with a collar apparently made out of a dishcloth — should be a stern reminder to us all of the dangers inherent in letting sportsmen dress themselves. It was too awful to watch any more of.
In defence of Yuri and SABC2 it must be added that two nights later they aired an excellent interview with Robin Peterson, the young cricket all-rounder. The sound was superb, the editing crisp. Peterson’s hopes and dreams were probed: he says the South African camp is ‘quietly confident” ahead of their first World Cup match, and he wants to score 100 in the final.
So the news is two months late. Who’s counting anyway, right Yuri?