Figure skating is
basically bowling alley ballet, a sport with the dual drawbacks of
first requiring make-up, sequinned costumes, music and choreographers
to perform and second being subject to judging, with all its
attendant history of corruption and fraud. Yet if anything, skating
is more popular now than ever, thanks to 'talent' shows like Dancing
On Ice. When you think about it, the Olympic format is almost as
close to Ted Mack's Amateur Hour as Dancing, or Strictly, or X
Factor. The biggest difference being the figure skating judges are
locked into a 1950s aesthetic, and susceptible to bribes, but are not
fed clever lines by the producers for the audience's entertainment.
If anything though, the 'kiss and cry' area at the Olympics is even
more OTT than X Factor.
When I covered Lake
Placid, there were 35 medal events; in Sochi there are 98. Sports
have been expanded, not often for the better (cf: classic vs
freestyle cross country skiing; 'team' figure skating) and new sports
have been added, including more judged sports, like freestyle skiing
and snowboarding. Of course there are also a couple of events that
excite me the way roller derby did when I was 11 years old:
short track speedskating and snowboard cross, which are basically the
same kind of Ben Hur races, one on ice and the other on snow. But
with new sports has come a new, younger audience and a problem for
commentators, as I've been discovering watching the BBC coverage.
Snowboarding is
analogous to surfing, and the lingo seems to have been built on a
gnarly surf base. But surfing has never been in danger of reaching
the Olympics. Snowboarding is one of the few sports at the Winter Olympics where the competitors don't dress in lycra bondage gear, and the only one where a competitor (in Vancouver) was barred from the games after testing positive for marijuana, which would imply that it is the only sport where pot is a performance enhancing drug. So it's a young, groovy thing, which means BBC
commentators appear to be determined to do the verbal equivalent of a
1440 Yolo flip on every routine. This Jonathan Pearce approach might
work on radio, and attract a lot of attention, but it doesn't do much
to enlighten the audience. On the other hand, I once asked a snowboarder,
while I was doing commentary at the 2005 Winter University Games, what
'huge air' meant, and he said, 'well, like, the air, it was huge'. So
now we knew.
On the other hand,
you'd think curling would be a natural fit, partly because the
Scottish (whoops, I mean British) teams are quite good, and partly
because it has the same sort of appeal as snooker, lawn bowls, or
even darts. Which means the BBC commentators approach each end with a
sort of genteel calm, regardless of how tight the competition is, and
even in celebration of a British win have all the reserve of Phil
Drabble commiserating with the second place finisher at a sheepdog
trial. What would be instructive would be to swap the snowboarding
and curling commentary teams around, if only for a day.
Meanwhile, Great Britain & Northern Ireland picked up its first gold medal Friday, in skeleton, and I watched
Lizzy Yarnold's impressive win to prepare myself for chat on Saturday morning's
World Service Weekend programme. Skeleton bob is basically going down
a bobsled run on a sled, head first the way you would on your own
Flexible Flyer as a kid. It's been in the Olympics before, on the
Cresta run in St. Moritz, and it's probably the most accessible and
human of the bob run events: the bobsled itself being conducted
inside a bumper car, while the luge, in Tony Kornhesier's great
phrase, resembling Dracula going downhill in his coffin.
I caught the last of
the four skeleton runs, and it was gripping stuff—with the
difference of third and fourth places coming down to .04 seconds
(four one-hundreths of one second) over the combined FOUR runs. But when it got to
Yarnold and the final run, there was little grip left. She had built
up a huge (0.78 seconds!) lead over the first three runs: all she
really needed to do was get to the bottom without crashing to win.
This was pointed out,
hesitantly by Amy Williams, the skeleton expert commentator, which
then set Colin Bryce off into a mad effort to rebuild the tension.
Fair enough, because the pair had been pretty good in explaining how
the event worked, and the way in which Britain, just like East
Germany thirty years ago, had identified athletes to draft into the
sport and concentrated on sled technology, so despite not having a track
of their own to practice on they had achieved remarkable success. They
also drifted into those areas that make you wonder what 'experts' are
for. Yes, the racers will enjoy the podium, they will be happy, and
yes, they'd really like to win. You do not have to have raced at Olympic level to
provide such insights. But once the race started, all explanation was
off anyway. 'Speed will be crucial here,' said Bryce, which was
self-evident enough, but actually wasn't the most crucial thing. Then
he pulled out the commentator's greatest enemy, the cliché's cliché,
just before the start. 'Lizzie GOES FOR GOLD FOR BRITAIN' he said, a
verbal tabloid headline simple enough for any audience to understand.
The rest of the run was
basically Amy Williams cheering Lizzy down the course. This raises
the interesting point of why you need an expert commentator to cheer.
Why not have Lizzie's husband, or grandmother, or next-door-neighbor,
or Brian Blessed instead? At one point Bryce
interjected 'she's flying now', which was daring in the sense that he
didn't have David Vine's Ski Sunday tape delay to prove him hundreths
of a second right, but basically anyone going down a bob run on a
skeleton is figuratively flying. It is a difficult thing: momentum means some bumps will slow you down less than you might think, and there's no way for the naked eye to calculate how many hundreths of a second may have been gained or lost. Yarnold won by almost a full second (0.96) but remember that's a full second after FOUR runs. And as she celebrated, Amy
Williams was 'crying for her, crying for everyone' which maybe Brian
Blessed could not have done better, and I appreciated her tears for me.
Yarnold herself seems
completely likeable, a great person for a great story, and I suppose
we can expect the Seoul Hockey Syndrome to mean she will appear on a
lot more BBC in the future than she has in the past. But I was amused
by her nickname, which is 'The Yarnold'. I have written before about
the remarkable flatness of British nicknames. If Mean Joe Green had
been British, his nickname would have been 'Greeners'. Cool Papa Bell
would have been 'Bellsy'. And Broadway Joe Namath would have been
lucky to be 'Joe'. Or maybe 'The Namath'.
1 comment :
Or her new nickname "The Yar-gold", which is almost certainly another one of those "verbal tabloid headlines" :-D
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