So, Britain has a record haul of medals from the Winter
Olympics in South Korea, and I can honestly say, with hand on heart, I give not
one jot. I mean, the WO is great if you’re Canadian, Scandinavian or happen to
live in the Alps, but what possible interest could a nation like ours, which
gets reduced to a swarm of quivering morons by half an inch of snow, have in
such an event?
Let’s be honest. A true representation of a Brit at the
Winter Olympics would be a bloke from Birmingham, gazing forlornly down the
toboggan run, moaning that the council hadn’t been out to grit it.
My only personal experience of Alpine Sports is tumbling
arse over tit down the dry slope at Llandudno, with a pair of skis briefly
attached to my feet, and I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve ever
met who would choose Switzerland over Spain as a holiday resort. So, the
question I have to ask is, where do all these British Winter Olympians come
from?
If you’ve seen the biopic movie of the British ski jumper Eddie
‘The Eagle’ Edwards, you’ll know exactly where they come from. Edwards was a
man whose greatest challenge lay not in summoning the courage to launch himself
down a ninety-metre ramp and out into oblivion toward possible death, but
rather in getting the British Olympic committee to allow him into their hallowed
fold. See, Edwards made the huge mistake of not hailing from a rich family, and
the stuffy, stuck up, old boys’ club that ran things didn’t like the cut of his
jib one little bit.
British Winter Olympic athletes are the kind of people who
can afford to spend half their life on holiday in the Alps from a very early
age. Winter sports are extremely elitist if you happen to hail from a country
where it only snows once every five years. The protagonists are not required to
be any good, only wealthy enough to compete. And once they’ve had their jolly
and come last in the giant slalom, they’re made for life as a member of the BBC’s
small army of ‘experts’ who get to travel half way around the world to make
dumb comments about a minority sport no one is interested in, being broadcast
at three o’clock in the morning.
The Winter Olympics is bollocks for any British person who
isn’t a TV presenter or a middle-class yahoo. Come the revolution, professional
snowboarders from Middlesex should be first against the wall.