The utterly arbitrary A-Z of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad

12:21: And so our Olympic odyssey draws to a close. It has been a strange sort of odyssey, being entirely sedentary apart from those intervals in which All Night Olympics left the couch to replace the matchsticks propping up his eyelids and refill the drip supplying his intravenous caffeine line.

12:30: Half past seven on a Sunday morning in Beijing and the men’s marathon is off. Numerous locals, perhaps residents of a local asylum, have turned out to watch. We suspect each spectator has a gun barrel pressed into the small of their back by a representative of the People’s Liberation Army.

12:45: Marathon update: They’re still running.

1:00: It seems that breathing the Beijing air for a day is the equivalent to smoking 72 cigarettes (We read this on Wikipedia. After we had written it there). This may explain the devil-may-care attitude of the marathon laggard who has just lit up a large Montecristo.

01:11: ‘I have to say, there’s a phenomenal crowd following this race.’ They’re at gunpoint, George.

01:30: Marathon update: The running continues.  

02:07: ‘This is really exciting,’ says George Hamilton. George is obviously watching something else in the commentary box, perhaps a pirated DVD of the Batman film. He could not be describing the middle portion of a 26-mile race. Or perhaps the 33 cigarettes he has already ingested today through the Beijing air have affected his brain.

02:30: Sorry, we’ve just lost interest in the marathon. We’re bored, so we’re going to do one of those gimmicky alphabet lists you see.

Before we go and before the list [tear ducts prickling], thank you to everyone who read this blog and all who took the trouble to comment. If you’d like to hear more commentary in a similar vein, do feel free to ceaselessly lobby The Irish Times. No, honestly. Do. Say things like: ‘Give this man a regular column or we’ll stop buying the paper and lose the will to live, in that order.’

The Utterly Arbitrary A-Z of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad 

A is for archery. Guaranteed to send you asleep at four in morning. It’s better than Night Nurse.

B is for Bolt. Lightning / Thunder / From the blue etc etc.

C is for Clare Balding of the BBC, who must be gagged at the earliest opportunity, preferably with good strong masking tape, not the cheap stuff you find in garden centres, really industrial quality stuff, to prevent her from ever ever talking about Team GB’s medals haul ever again. Ever.

D is for Davies, Barry. Make this man a peer of the realm for patriotic services to the Team GB hockey sides.

E is for Evil Knievel. We care deeply about the neglected sport of Flaming Hoop Motorbike Jumping and urge the IOC to include it in the Games of the Olympiad. To make space, we suggest simply casting archery into the sporting wilderness it so richly deserves to occupy.

F is for Fatima Whitbread, whose hilarious rhyming nickname we are too cowardly to publish. She’s litigious, that one.

G is for GB, Team. It was like the last night of the Proms. Every night. Just heaven.

H is for high-fiving. There is nothing you can do to a beach volleyball player to prevent them high-fiving. They could be bound upside-down in a barrel of water and they’d still find a way.

I is for the first person singular, which we (see?) decided not to use in this blog. Was that annoying?

J is for Johnson, Jade. The long jumper who has never seen a sandpit she could resist hurling herself into. She is allergic to sand.

K is for kabuki theatre, traditional in Japan. Why is this relevant? Because on at least two occasions commentators announced they were reporting from Japan. And a horsey man on RTE missed the news that Czechoslovakia ceased to exist as a nation-state in 1993. Get an atlas, lads.

L is for Lee Chang-Hwan, archer, who, in an emotional interview on Korean TV’s version of Dr Phil, candidly admitted he was going through 1,200 arrows a day. It’s okay; he’s in Archers Anonymous now.

M is for Marty Morrissey, whose suave jig-dancing and golf-buggy-driving were sure to have impressed the sexy ladies at the beach volleyball. Apparently he’s marrying one of the cheerleaders.

N is for the Nigerian footballers, whose ball-hogging antics had their coach in a rage and everyone else laughing riotously at his use of the term ‘ball-hogging’.

O is for Olive Loughnane, Irish funny walker whose truly hilarious exploits earned her seventh place.

P is for ping-pong, but they call it table tennis to make it sound less ludicrous.

Q is for quotient of calories, which is 12,000 a day in Michael Phelps’ case. To this end, Phelps consumes matter more or less constantly, biting chunks out of pieces of furniture in his vicinity, foraging through bins he passes in the street, and so forth.

R is for the RTE website. Catch the words ‘Greco-Roman wrestling’ on RTE’s Olympics page before the link is deleted.

S is for Synchronised           Swimming

               Synchronised            Swimming

Self-indulgently, we are repeating this.

                                            repeating this.

T is for taekwondo. A raging Angel Valodia Matos landed a superbly executed two-point kick in his semi-final (On the referee’s head, and intentionally).

U is for ultra-violet rays, of which All Night Olympics has been receiving little lately, leading to a short-lived scare we would develop the humorously named but bone-bending condition, rickets.

V is for volleyball, which is on BBC now, and about which we have not the slightest intention of writing. Keep it for the beach, high-fivers.

W is for Wrestling. [This is long-winded, but stick with it. Or don’t. See if I care] Quote of the Games goes to former Japanese wrestler Heigo Hamaguchi, whose daughter Kyoko was competing in Beijing in the 72 kg category. Hamaguchi san, a vocal chap, likes to bellow encouraging slogans at his daughter’s fights. Specifically for Beijing, he devised the brilliant catchphrase ‘Zettai makenai!’ meaning, for those unversed in the tongues of the Orient, ‘Never lose!’ It’s good, you have to give him that.

Anyhow, old Heigo feared the party-pooping Olympic organizers might suppress his persistent, loud and irritating shouting from the stands. He was asked what he would do if banned from screaming encouragement to his daughter. He said:

‘I will use my eyeballs to send my message.’

Now, this may sound utterly non-deranged in Japanese, but it kept us laughing for, oh, three or four seconds. Yes, that was too long, wasn’t it?

X is for Xue Chen, one of the lucky Chinese athletes who has avoided being shipped off to a labour camp (once the foreign press have left) for failing to win a medal.

Y is for Yngling. No one knows what this is. Because Team GB were the only ones with a rough idea, they won gold in this event by default.

Z is for zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz