I'm not one to go looking for an altercation, but I haven't shied away from sprinkling my tupennethworth regarding the Olympics amidst the jubilation and delirium pounding the status updates of various social media sites. Tennis and Football* aside, I really couldn't have been more indifferent had I been a vampire imprisoned by mine enemies decades since, nailed in a sturdy coffin, behind a solid, merciless brick wall, half-awake, half-hibernating, undead, unalive, unremembered.
Because I am, quite frankly, not one to cream myself because someone can run fast or chuck something far. I'm not five fucking years old. These may have been useful skills out on the savanna at the dawn of humanity, but nowadays we have cars. It doesn't matter that Usain Bolt can run 100m in under ten seconds. If I'm trying to run him over whilst driving a Micra, his legs will get broken.
On the subject of which, I watched the 100m, and that was, in my humble, the most over-hyped underwhelming ten seconds since I lost my virginity.
But what has ground my gears more than anything has been the frequent comparisons between footballers and Olympic athletes. This has the been the battleground on which I have jousted verbally with friends and acquaintances of late. The 'Why can't Footballers Be More like Athletes' has wound me up no end. For two reasons. One - footballers are athletes, but with more skill than the one-trick-ponies who emerge every four years in the hope to win a medal so they can make some extra wedge advertising tampons and shaving foam. Two - because deep down I suspect there is an element of class discrimination.
A ridiculous proportion of of GB athletes are privately educated. The majority, I'm guessing, are middle class. Footballers are, on the whole, working class. The dislike of the modern footballer is the dislike of the arriviste. It is the mentality that lauds the work of Blur, featuring Alex 'I make cheese ' James and his middle class mates pretending to be cockney jokers, but scorns Liam Gallagher as stupid* because he's got an accent, swears and looks after his hair. It is the scorn of Tom Buchanan for Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald knows where I'm coming from.
And, in my experience, there is no more unpleasant group, more casually racist, sexist and homophobic cackle than a university rugby team, pissed on their second pint of Fosters. They make obscene comments at women because they don't how to talk to them, coarse homophobic jokes to hide the fact they all want to finger each other, and do more than Marx ever could to radicalise any half-sentient student. Yet this insult to evolution are more often than not laughed off as Lads Letting of Steam.
Take a similar bunch of males, but working class and highly-paid, and being slightly*** more discreet. Somehow these are no longer Lads Being Lads but The End of Western Civilisation. I'm not making any claims for the moral upstandingness of footballers, I'm not even saying I particularly like them. But I'd much rather spend an evening in the company of a Balotelli or a Cantona than a Coe or Pendleton. In fact, I'd much rather be that walled-up vampire than spend an evening with Sebastian Coe. Unless it was it at his murder.
So, if you enjoyed the Olympics - I'm glad for you. But it's football season now, and the throwers and jumpers and repeated actioners can slither back into their little holes, as the world's most popular sport once again takes centre stage. The next nine months are going to mesmerising, horrible, heartbreaking, breathtaking and incredible. And Coe-free.
*Because they are proper sports, with balls. Literal balls, not cajones.
**To be fair, he probably is a bit a dickhead, but I no more or less than Blur and their cardboard pastiche working class culture, as seen through the eyes of the detached wanker who will never live like common people.
*** Slightly.
