If only armchair sport was an Olympic event

As a general rule, Rosita Boland doesn't watch any sport. But every four years she makes an exception for the Olympics. Why?

Apart from school hockey matches, the extent of my live sports viewing is restricted to the tennis I once saw at Wimbledon when I was given a returned ticket for a men’s semi-final on Centre Court. Who was playing? Can’t remember.

The fortnight of sports overload that is the Olympics starts today, so, in theory, that should make the next two weeks a viewing nightmare for such a committed sports unfan like me. Not so. I love the Olympics. Everything that real sports fans – not to mention sports journalists – quite probably hate about the Olympics circus, I adore.

I love the schmaltz of the over-long opening and closing ceremonies. Like the Generation Game’s predictable conveyor-belt prizes of cuddly toys, Hoovers, hairdryers and sandwich toasters, the Olympics ceremonies always feature small children, a pop-star of dubious merits, some technical wheeze that doesn’t quite work, and lashings of fireworks. It’s a bit like the Oscars crossed with a Disney film, although I do wish the athletes would wear the frocks to match for a bit of added visual interest – when you’ve seen one team blazer, you’ve seen them all.

Predictably, I also love the sports that don’t look like sports. In particular, the women’s gymnastics, where the impossible quicksilver movements of reed-thin bodies make you feel as large and clumsy as an ox in the comfortable stable of your own livingroom. Every four years, I remind myself of what a gymnast’s equipment is. Oh, that’s the beam, that’s the uneven bars, that’s the vault. And, er, that’s the floor. I devour the fruits of their years of astonishing training in a couple of hours and then forget most of their names forever. It seems a bit like cheating, but then again, cheating is a bit of an all-round sport itself at the Olympics these days.

The diving reminds me of opening a Swiss army knife: one minute there's a
closed-up body and the next, limbs snap out as sharp as knives, and slice without a ripple into the water. Sometimes I watch with the sound down, which makes it a sort of wonderfully Zen-like experience, between all that blue water and the perfect rhythmic dives.

As for the sychronised swimming, possibly the daftest Olympic sport ever, it
makes me laugh as much as any documentary by Michael Moore could.
Those sparkly costumes, clothes-pegged noses and improbably robotic movements are as good as watching cartoons; an invented, two-dimensional world, where they really do things differently. Sadly, they drew the line at putting men into the competition, which would have made for the best belly-laugh of the Olympics: think of those hairy legs poking up from the
water like bewildered clones of the Loch Ness Monster.

The track and field events are all terrifically serious and worthy – and endless. You just know you wouldn’t catch these nervy athletes watching sychronised swimming on their day off. Track and field gets oodles and oodles of coverage, particularly from hacks desperate to get away from the Barbie element of the Games. If the Olympics have a caste system, track and field athletes are the Brahmins at the top, table tennis, beach volleyball and sychronised swimming are the untouchables at the bottom.

Then, of course, there is the fun of flicking through the deadly dull sports,
where you marvel at what people do with their lives these days. Throwing a javelin, which is patently a sport that some geezer with a few drinks too many invented one night while playing darts in a bar. The shot put looks to me like a less interesting version of ducks-and-drakes.

Remember Ripley's Believe it or Not? It was a programme featuring strange and bizarre scenarios, which just happened to be true. Here's an admission that could be worthy of a Ripley's, Irish-style: I've never watched a live hurling, rugby or football match. Nor have I watched any of these sports on
television, with the exception of the occasional World Cup football match,
watched when Ireland are playing.

In fact, several so-called sports appear to be borrowed from the playground: there used to be an Olympic sport called hop, skip and jump. As for the hammer-throwing, it looks like a Crimewatch reconstruction of the lead-up to some horrible murder.

And there are the sports I’ve never heard of. Some of them sound like they’re on one of the take-away restaurant menus that get put through my letterbox daily. In fact, given that I’ll be spending a lot of time on the couch for the next fortnight – Taekwondo for dinner, anyone?