Taken with a pinch of salt

There is probably only one way to make watching the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics an even more unappealing proposition than it already is, and that is to watch it on TV in America, where the wall-to-wall coverage of the host network, NBC, has turned a dreary snow-sports cavalcade into an orgy of irritating American jingoism on a scale not witnessed since, well, the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

As if all the self-pitying Yank nationalism wasn’t enough, last week I got an e-mail from an acquaintance of mine, a hack who is covering the Games for several British media outlets. From the despairing tone of his dispatch, it sounds as though a stint at these Games is something akin to the sports journalist’s equivalent of latrine duty, given that Salt Lake City is, of course, the capital of Mormonland, and thus an exceedingly difficult place in which to get a drink.

Incidentally, this writer does not intend to add his tuppence’worth to the supposed rights and wrongs of the Canadian figure skaters getting gold medals after being supposedly cheated out of their birthright by bent judges, for the exceedingly sound reasons that (a) I deliberately went out of my way to avoid watching any of it, and (b) this is supposed to be a sports column, and no activity where the winner is decided by a row of officials metaphorically holding up marked cards can be called a sport.

The best moment of the Games so far, an accolade for which there has been less than intense competition, was provided by the Australian speed-skater, Steven Bradbury, whose astute ploy of lagging miles behind the other four skaters in the field was stunningly vindicated when they all crashed into each other on the final bend.

Thus, having earlier come within inches of getting lapped by his fellow competitors, Bradbury was left to glide gracefully over the finish line at positively glacial speed.

The American participant in the field, who was the pre-race favourite and who eventually picked himself up from the melée to finish second, was a fellow by the name of Apollo Ohno, which is the kind of open goal that even Foul Play cannot be arsed to convert.

Ohno’s demise did not go down well with the Yank crowd, as one can imagine. There was much muttering of disqualifications and re-runs, and one spectator (presumably fat and red-faced, waving a Stars and Stripes) yelled at Bradbury, “You better wipe that smile off your face, buddy!” as he went up to collect his gold medal.

As is traditional at Olympic-related gatherings, the profile of the Irish team has lurked somewhere between the invisible and the subterranean. Indeed, until the unexpected appearance of Lord Clifton Hugh Lancelot De Verdon Wrottesley last week, I would wager that most of us were unaware that Ireland had sent any athletes to Salt Lake City at all.

That was until last Wednesday’s stunning, nay shocking, news that Lord Clifton (and we thought Irish rugby was a class-structured sport), had not only finished fourth in the skeleton, but had come within 0.61 seconds of the gold medal.

All of which probably makes Lord Clifton this year’s Ian Wiley, the unfortunate canoeist who missed out on a medal at the 1992 Barcelona Games by mere atoms, and with it all the usual open-top bus rides, commercial endorsements, and civic receptions with Bertie Ahern.

No sooner had the nation got its breath back, however, than normal service was resumed with the news that another of our representatives, Paul O’Connor, had finished 70th out of 71 in the 1.5km cross-country sprint. Now that’s more like it!

FÓGRA: Given that Foul Play has written in these pages previously about what he sees as the unspeakable inadequacy of TV3’s Champions League coverage, it seems only fair and just to commend them for their new policy of showing delayed transmissions of matches not featuring English teams.

To be treated to full re-runs of Real Madrid-Porto and Barcelona-Roma last week was an unexpected joy, and the fact that the latter match was a stultifying exercise in mutual shadow-boxing is beside the point. More, please.