Sport has an infinity of delights to offer in this hard, unplayful world. There is the pure physical relief that comes with brisk, blood-stirring exertion. There is sport’s excitement which so often can lift the heart beating into the throat. And there is the beauty in sport – in its own way a beauty as imperishable as art or a lovely moonscape. These three attractions alone give sport a high place among the simple, enduring joys of living.
I think of Samuel Johnson (1709-84), most clumsy and unathletic of men, the greatest intellectual of his age, how he found a kind of exaltation in physical exercise. He swam in cold rivers and walked for miles and he ran races with pretty ladies and he even rolled himself down grassy hills, over and over in a whirl of limbs, to amuse children and to shake up the ageing blood. When he was very old he most wisely said to a friend who came to visit him: ‘I have found in life how much happiness is gained, or, to put it more carefully, how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the body!’
One of my most vivid memories, which has stayed in my mind for more than 70 years is of Frank Worrell at the Queen’s Park Oval in Port-of-Spain late-cutting the Trinidad leg-spinner, Wilfred Ferguson, twice to the boundary with all the elegance in the world in the turn of his wrist and the flash of his shining bat. That for me is a timeless image of beauty – just as much as the image of Chartres Cathedral seen across a wheat field in France or a half-moon burning in the trees along the silver Essequibo, loveliest river in the world.
And I was thinking which sporting event I have seen was the most dramatic and memorable out of the multitude I have witnessed over the years. If I could have seen it – and not just listened in crackling radio commentary – the last over of the Tied Test at Brisbane between West Indies and Australia in December 1960 would have won the prize. And the greatest tennis match ever played, the Wimbledon final in 2008, when Nadal beat Federer in five continually breath-taking sets, has to be in serious contention. But I think the greatest of them all must be Usain Bolt’s double strike of unforgettable power in the 100 and 200 metres races at Beijing in 2008. In the setting of the Olympics those triumphant world record races were the very definition of sublime sporting achievement.
Now here I am again enjoying the Paris Olympic Games. And there is, as always, a special quality to the Games. The Olympic Games I believe, because of a special element not present in other great sporting occasions to anything like the same degree, possess a unique irreplaceable flavour. The Games, with their ancestry in ancient Greece, have inherited a capacity for the tragedy and comedy which ancient Greece first brought to full maturity in poetry and drama. As a result ‘the play’s the thing’ and crude results are not all-important. This means that, while in one sense the thousands upon thousands of competitors who have no hope of medals are simple cannon-fodder for the stars, at a more fundamental level they give the Games their strongest heartbeat and their lasting value. More than any other sporting event – more than the soccer World Cup, more than Wimbledon and the Davis Cup, more than cricket Test matches and World Championships in every sport under the sun – the Olympics really are more about taking part than about winning. There will be those who scoff at such a statement. But I believe it to be true. A little of the spirit of the 300 at Thermopylae seems to enter into any Olympic competition and, win or lose, every contestant at the race’s end breathes unknowingly Simonides’s famous words:
Go, tell the Spartans,
Those that passeth by,
That faithful to their precepts,
Here we lie.
This peculiar element in the Olympics explains why, over and over again, the Games seem to come to life at times of humour, heartbreak and failure. It is by no means only the great stars and the world records and the blaze of glory that catch the imagination of millions upon millions watching the Olympics. Even if there’s nothing to match Usain Bolt’s sublime achievement there is sure to be more than enough human drama to make the Games again one of the unforgettable sporting experiences of my life.
