Posterity

A few weeks ago I played cricket for the second time this summer. Much like the first time, it served to simply remind me why I avoided playing sport at school and pretty much ever since. I put this down to a combination of things: I am a bad loser, I am impatient, I have dreadful coordination and I don't like being cold/wet/too hot. This meant that as a youth I would give up on pretty much every sport instantly and with bad grace.
Not surprisingly, this defined much of my childhood/adolescence. I did not make friends with the sporty types, I hung out with the geeks and freaks: the interesting people. I actively looked for ways to emphasise my distance from sporty conformist types in all the ways that such teenagers usually do: by growing my hair and embracing counter-culture. The long hair changed with my changing tastes, but the sense that I was apart from the norm never did; what I call my 'indie sensibilities'. When Britpop went mainstream, I immersed myself in techno: that's the level of bloody-minded indie I'm talking about. However much I have integrated into society since I've grown up, I can never shake that sense of separation, nor do I want to. All people like to think they're different don't they, even when they're not. That is until we get to a certain level of identity. Most people are happy to share a common national identity, even if that is a less consistent identity group than most others. Many people are happy to share an amount of their identity with other supporters of a sports team, frequently donning matching clothes to further merge their collective identities. Oddly, many people consider this to be the behavior that defines them as individuals.
Needless to say, I find any collective identity larger than a few people and smaller than national something to be avoided. Also not surprisingly, such group identities usually only manifest around sport. Given all of this, I was clearly a prime candidate for the kind of skepticism that was in evidence amongst many of the population in the period we may now refer to as BO (Before Olympics) or perhaps more accurately BOC (Before Opening Ceremony). Like every other skeptic I've encountered, the opening ceremony was a kind damascene moment in which my natural cynicism was melted away by a warmth of feeling that seemed to wash over our (deserted) capital. I enjoyed every moment of the games in the weeks to come, although I didn't actually watch any sport, I just reveled in the good feeling (and functional public transport). In this (not actually watching the sport) I realise that I was in the minority; when I was at my second cricket match of the summer, most people who hadn't seen each other since talked about the Olympics.
Cricketer1: Did you watch the Olympics?
Cricketer2: Yeah, it was really good.
Cricketer1: What did you watch?
Cricketer2: Oh, I watched the cycling and the swimming and the athletics and some gymnastics, yeah it was really good.
Cricketer1: Yeah, it was awesome.
Cricketer2: Yeah, except beach volleyball, that's not a sport.
Cricketer1: No, that's rubbish. But everything else was great.
Cricketer2: Yeah, it was amazing. Imagine if it was always on, that would be great.
And so on. I relate this (perhaps not entirely authentic) conversation to illustrate just how much the Olympics changed our society for the better: many many men didn't talk about football for a number of days. Obviously the games achieved much more than this: undoubtedly they will inspire some children to become athletes, maybe some will be inspired by the opening ceremony to go and work in the NHS, maybe some will be inspired by the Paralympic opening ceremony to read books and be more like Stephen Hawking. The motto of the games was 'inspire a generation'. Hopefully that wasn't just 'inspire them to try running faster than everyone else', because that's a limited aspiration that is guaranteed to create more losers than winners.
I understand the need to get young people more active but as a youngster, team sports put me right off exercise for years. It took me a long time to find forms of exercise that didn't require me to associate with people obsessed with being better than me. I did eventually find such activities and I enjoy them very much, indeed it is the enjoyment of physical activity and exercise that led me to believe that I might actually enjoy playing a sport that I have loved to watch for many years. I was wrong. Or perhaps that was enjoying it, perhaps that is as much enjoyment as anyone gets out of playing team sports - I can only assume not.
I'll probably persevere with playing cricket once or twice a summer with friends, as I enjoy the peripheral activities and the company of friends, but I don't think there is anything that could have been done differently in my youth that would have made me passionate about playing. I had other interests, I developed other skills, I joined the the outsiders, and I'm glad I did, but no one was ever going to give me a medal for that.
The Olympics have been a great show and I think it's right that we acknowledge the monumental efforts of the athletes and the fact that the games bring the world together in a way that is genuinely hopeful. However, the Olympics are now over and it's time for us to get on with life, which, if you're not an elite athlete, is a very different thing from sport.