Tag Archives: olympics

Attracted by the sheen of gold

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Twenty years ago, during the 1984 Olympic in Los Angeles, I was on a Brownie camp. While my fellow Brownies and I were off dancing around the paper mache mushroom, or whatever it was that we did on those camps, one of the leaders was off in her car listening to the radio.

Suddenly she shot out of her car and came running over to us as she screeched (in a way that only women in their 40s can screech), “WE’VE GOT GOLD!”

Tonight I left work at around the same time that Mary-Kate and Ashley’s race started. I figured that I’d get the race results when I got home, but I didn’t count on the bus driver. I arrived at the bus with a hearty 10 minutes to spare. As I boarded I was engulfed by some horrible AM station. The announcer had the most annoying New Zillun accent imaginable – the kind of accent that parents make their kids go to speech lessons to overcome. He was excitedly recounting how the “Evers-Swindoow twuns” had won a gold medal. The drought is over, a nation rejoices, etc.

A few stops down the route home, a fellow got on and excitedly announced that “we’ve won a gold”. He and the bus driver than started discussion the Olympics. Their topic of conversation got on to discussing what are “proper” Olympic sports and what aren’t. In short, they decided:

Proper Olympic Sports
Running
Javelin
Discus
Shot put
Long jump
High jump
Swimming

Not Proper Olympic Sports
Synchronised swimming
Synchronised diving
Golf
Equestrian
Any sport where the winner is decided by judging.

Sports that would be ok to include as an Olympic sport
Darts, because it’s not unlike archery, which is proper.

My stop didn’t come soon enough.

Sanity barely intact, I staggered home and caught a reporter interviewing the medal winners, who are now being nicknamed “The Golden Girls”, which, quite frankly, is an insult to that great sitcom.

The reporter asked them what it was like having the “hopes of the nation” weighing upon them, but one of them (which?) said they didn’t, and they were really just doing it for themselves. The reporter was trying to nudge them to make some sort of statement like “Thank you to all New Zealanders for your support,” but on the two occasions they were offered to make such a statement, they failed to take her bait. In the end the reporter gushed, “Gosh, I think I’m more excited than you are!” and then thrust her microphone back at one of them (which?) for her reaction. How do you react when someone wants your response to their spurt of verbal diarrhoea? By remaining super cool.

O is for Olga

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I stayed up too late last night watching the women’s shot put finals. I was initially interested in it because Valerie Adams had made it through to the final and I wanted to see how she’d do, but after I started watching it for a while, I noticed an interesting thing: there were a lot of competitors from ex-communist countries.

Yes, how we laughed during the ’70s and ’80s when the Iron Curtain ladymans would show up and grunt and heave their way to gold at the Olympics. Oh how we snickered as we saw the sweat glistening on their moustaches.

But a few years ago I saw a documentary about some women who, as teenaged swimmers in East Germany, had been given steroids. They were told that it was vitamins, but were a little alarmed when the vitamins seemed to make their voices deepen and bodies bulk up. They went on to Olympic victory, which theoretically proved communism’s supremacy. But some of them were now infertile, one had had a sex change.

In the women’s shot put final, six of the 12 competitors were from Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany, and indeed they took six of the places in the top seven (the silver medal went to a Cuban). Most of these women were born in the late ’60s or ’70s, making them the right age to have received some special vitamins, though it is worth noting that the two Belarus chicks were born in the early ’80s.

So are these top shot putting women remnants of communist-era steroid or hormone use? Or is it just that those countries have a really good history and tradition of shot putting? Perhaps it’s genetic. Or maybe a combination of all.

But it will be most interesting in, say, 10 years’ time when the old communist ladies have retired and the newer breed of non-vitamin-enhanced shot putters are in their place. They probably won’t get the same distances (the world record hasn’t changed since 1987, the Olympic record since 1980), but things will be a bit more exciting.