It’s Only A Game

When reading Brian Moore’s autobiography, Beware Of The Dog (which I can thoroughly recommend to rugby fans everywhere, particularly those who hate him) recently, one phrase stuck out at me. In reference to the period in the late 80s & early 90s when South African sides were excluded from the sporting world in protest against apartheid, Moore writes that “I have never subscribed to boycotting sporting events unless they are accompanied by a total breaking of trade and diplomatic relations. I do not accept that sport should pay the political price when governments and business do not do likewise. Sport is an easy target, one that can be, and is, bullied by those who will not take similarly difficult decisions”. That single statement perfectly distils much of the ‘official’ attitude to sport; whilst clearly a significant enough part of our modern world to be considered a part of the political sphere, it isn’t really held to have much value over the purely symbolic, with the economy and wars taking significant precedence. Indeed, this attitude of sport being some sort of add-on, rather than the central constituent of one’s way of life, pervades all classes and levels of modern society; despite the way that the football clubs of our nation continue to be our biggest-selling global brand and are such prominent figures of our social world, sporting news is relegated to its own private little section of the paper and TV news, and during the Olympics of last summer there were even columnists who wrote articles of the opinion that the news’ greatly increased coverage of sport during this period was distracting the focus of these broadcasts away from ‘real news’*.

This attitude could potentially be considered an offshoot of our schooldays; schoolteachers, particularly at the lower ages, hate their charges becoming overly competitive, as taking it all too seriously can easily lead to jealousies, resentments and arrogance that just make the lot of a teacher even more of a social minefield than it already is. That’s not to say they think all competition is a bad thing, merely that it all works much better for everyone if it’s not blown out of all proportion and made to be the be-all and end-all of the school hierarchy. Since this competitiveness is, of course, most prominently demonstrated on the sporting field and, despite many a teacher’s efforts to the contrary, the practice of class’ social structure dividing along lines very similar to sporting (or, in many cases simply footballing) ability is common in schools across the country, among schoolchildren of all ages. In an effort to at least try and prevent this, many children are encouraged from a young age not to take the results of various sporting contests too seriously; hence the origin of that age-old phrase ‘it’s only a game’.

But is it really ‘just a game’? Is sport to be so easily dismissed as an irrelevant sideshow, just a game for kids to mess around with and to make us laugh, before we get on with the business of the ‘real world’? It’s true that sport has all manner of reasons for not totally dominating our way of life; it doesn’t greatly affect how many people are in work or the productive output of the human race in general, it doesn’t help save the environment or make any real change on our world’s political landscape, and its contribution to human technological advancement isn’t quite as significant as that of, say, NASA. However, this doesn’t mean that sport is merely some meaningless sideshow, unimportant in the grand scheme of things without lasting consequences; indeed, arguably, sport does just as much for mankind as a whole than everything your chosen newspaper will publish this year.

Consider the story of the famous Christmas football matches that took place in No Man’s Land in the winter of 1915 on the Western front, allowing Entente and Alliance forces to come into contact with one another and realise that these young men on the other side of the barbed wire were not so very different from themselves; one of the first times that the jingoistic view of the enemy as some kind of unimaginable monster was challenged and thus helping to pave the way for modern pacifism. Consider the 1995 Rugby World Cup, in which the new South African president Nelson Mandela was able to unite members of all ethnicities within ‘the Rainbow Nation’ behind a traditionally Afrikaner sport and to start making slow inroads into the decades of institutionalised racism that had previously blighted the country.  Consider how, every Saturday, men and women across the globe give up a few hours of their day to do something that helps them get a little bit healthier, gets them out and about and interacting with other people, and in many cases provides a regular reminder of the value of teamwork and generally getting along with one another.

Admittedly, these sentiments are not universally practiced within the sporting world, but in the majority of cases they are; and in that respect sport may be taking us closer to utopia than any number of technological achievements. Sport demonstrates to us the value of commitment, teamwork, dedication and the need to make sacrifices in the pursuit of greatness, not to mention the astounding ability sport has to bring people from all walks of life together and show them off at their best, in the process serving social equality and understanding better than any political lobbying. A post like this has little in the way of a natural conclusion, but it does have a point; the idea that sport is ‘only a game’ ignores that it, and what it stands for, can be so much more than that, and that to ignore its significance, to dismiss it as something merely symbolic, is indicative of an attitude that may have somewhat lost sight of what its ultimate goal is.

Basically, sport is a pretty awesome thing and deserves a little more respect in places.

*The ‘real news’ in question actually referred to the situation in Syria, something I’ve already done a post and personally consider something definitely not worth being shoved to one side for anything; but it was nonetheless reported with all appropriate seriousness and the main complaint of the writer in question appeared to be that newsreaders were being too happy by announcing medals immediately after reporting on it. And anyway, it weakens my point to mention that.

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The First Test

Right, I think I have just remembered to start breathing again after a far too tense end to the Lions’ first test in Brisbane, and so I think it’s time for one of my alternative awards ceremonies. With only one game to review, I’m not going to give each team a separate series of awards, but rather one each for the key positional groups (across both sides; so both Lions’ and Australian front rowers are both covered under the same category, for example). Some of these will be individual, some will refer to a specific team, and some will just refer to the way the game played out in that position. I will also make a few more general comments at the end, just because there are one or two things I could do with getting off my chest.

OK? Right, let’s get started.

We begin with the FRONT ROW, who collectively take the Reverse Parallels Award for Strangest Resemblance of A Previous Lions Series. The series in question is 1997’s South Africa Tour, the last time the Lions actually won a series, and against all the odds to boot. The South Africans were world champions, champing at the bit for the return of the Lions (who were usually easybeats for past Springbok sides) after a 17-year long apartheid-based drought. Many salivated at the prospect of the giant South African scrum, featuring the legendary 21 stone Os du Randt among others, going up against a comparatively tiny Lions front row, but through a mixture of technique and grit the Lions were able to match their opponents and nullify the South African forwards.

If any of that sounds familiar, then it’s because a lot of people were making bones about it prior to this series, but with the roles reversed. The Australian front row incumbents, Benn Robinson, Ben Alexander and Stephen Moore are noted proponents of the loose but are reckoned to be at scrum time, whereas the Lions’ front row for this test was made up of the tour’s three strongest surviving scrummagers; Alex Corbisiero, Tom Youngs and the scrummaging legend that is Adam Jones. And, indeed, at the Lions’ first scrum, all seemed to be in order; much like on the ’97 tour, the dominant scrum instantly sent the weaker side scurrying backwards and won a penalty, but from then on both the ’13 Aussies and ’97 Lions set about nullifying their opponents’ weapon. Throughout the match Lions fans got excited every time a scrum came along, waiting for a dominant display that never really came. Instead, the Australians used every dirty trick in the book to keep the scrum battle at least ambiguous and that first dominant scrum proved to be the only one. Indeed, as the Lions brought on their substitutes the Australian’s tactical scrummaging began to swing things in their favour, and it’s worth noting that both of the Australian’s last two crucial penalty attempts came from scrums. Whatever you think of referee Chris Pollock’s display (and he gave us plenty to talk about) he should never have been able to give those penalties were the Lions as dominant as they were ‘meant’ to be.

Right, enough about the fat boys; we move on to the SECOND ROW, and Australian captain James Horwill in particular. Horwill takes the dubious honour of the Eyes In The Back Of His Head Award for Being Victim Of The Most Eagle-Eyed Official- but I’m not talking about Pollock. The official in question is whichever sharp-eyed bystander managed to notice, and subsequently refer to the citing officer, an incident where Horwill allegedly stamped on the face of Lions’ lock Alun Wyn Jones (the citing officer presumably thought it was an accident, as he has now been cleared and is free to play in the second test.). You can view the incident here, and I would challenge you to spot what they’re talking about before the camera goes to slo-mo; I watched the match in a bar with around 200 partisan Lions fans in it, and not one of them picked it up at the time. Neither did either of the people I showed that clip to until the replay, and given the lack of reaction from the crowd there weren’t many of them who noticed it either. Whilst the incident has caused (predictably enough) much furore online, I think real credit goes to the one person who actually managed to catch it in real time.

Next come the BACK ROW and another award for an Australian. This time it’s flanker Michael Hooper, who takes the Man Of Many Faces Award for Most Impersonations. Hooper is not a regular fixture in the Wallaby squad, but then again there’s not much he can do about that when the Wallabies’ normal openside is the great David Pocock, and it was a bitter blow to the Aussies when it was announced Pocock was injured and would not be able to take part in the series. The management and those Australian pundits whose opinions I have read refused to betray a smidgeon of concern, confidently predicting that Hooper would be able to fill Pocock’s sizeable shoes. So no pressure there then.

Hooper didn’t play badly, but the game and the refereeing were not friendly to ball-snafflers of Pocock’s mould, as Brian O’Driscoll learned to his cost early on. Indeed, the real star of both back rows was Aussie debutant Ben Mowen, who did a number on Lions scrum-half Mike Phillips and in the process almost single-handedly destabilised the Lions’ entire plan of attack. I will be interested to see how they react in the second test. However, the reason Hooper gets the award this week came around the 60-minute mark, when Australian centre Pat McCabe suffered a neck injury. Low on backs replacements, Robbie Deans took the unusual descision to bring on substitute flanker Liam Gill and give Hooper a run at outside centre. That Alex Cuthbert was immediately sent up the midfield to score a try for the Lions will be laid at Hooper’s feet by some, but given that the move was a Jonny Sexton special I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. Certainly, he hardly looked out of place for the rest of the match.

Dammit, why do all my posts turn into two parters nowadays? Ah well, backs next time I guess.

Lions History

Yes, it’s Lions time again and, with Film Fortnight over, I thought it was high time to start talking about the greatest adventure in modern rugby. I’ve already gone on three long semi-rants with regards to the squad selection (and yes, I was rather glad that Rory Best made it onto the tour in the end, even if he hasn’t been playing fantastically well) and was originally going to start off with a nice long analysis of the warmup games thus far. However, I then decided that there was no way I was going to be able to restrict that to anything less than fourteen thousand posts, especially given that the Lions’ penultimate game was played this morning, so I thought I’d just do a post about each test (yes, the awards ceremony’s coming back) and this; a potted history of the British and Irish Lions.

The Lions story begins in 1888, when a group of upper class Britons, (as most rugby players were at the time) decided to go for an extended tour around Australia and New Zealand. There was no national setup at the time in either country so the side played mainly provincial and university sides. The tour wasn’t especially serious, being little more than a very long, privately funded rugby-playing jolly. The next year, two significant events occured; the South African Rugby Union was founded, and a cricketing outfit went down to South Africa and slaughtered every side they came across. This positive attitude to not daring to come anywhere close to challenging the motherland among the locals was attractive to the English RFU, so a couple of years later in 1891 they revived the spirit of the ’88 tourists and sent the first official touring party down. In collaboration with the SRU, a selection of English and Scottish internationals/senior players, captained by Bill Maclagan, set off to South Africa for a nineteen-match tour. To say that they captured the spirit of ’88 can be confirmed by one tourist’s (Paul Clauss, for the record) description of the tour as ‘all champagne and travel’, and like the cricketers they swept all before them. That might be expected when the founders of a sport travel to a company that has only played it for two years, but what might not have been expected was the first match against Cape Town Clubs. In this game Carles ‘Hasie’ Versfeld ‘found an opening, put in a grand sprint and scored a try amidst tremendous cheering’. That this was the only point scored against them during the tour, and that they scored 224 themselves, mattered not; the Afrikaaner population loved the idea that they, despite all the odds, had put one over on the touring side. Hasie Versfeld became something of a national treasure (among the whites at least), and rugby became the white South African’s sport of choice. It’s no coincidence that South African rugby’s Pretoria home is named after Hasie’s brother, Loftus Versfeld. Just twelve years later, when the British came to tour again, they won the series outright for the first time (the score was 1-0, with two tests drawn), and wouldn’t lose another one for 73 years.

A few things had changed in those twelve years; the tour became more of an established thing, and the British Isles team did the rounds of both Australia & New Zealand and South Africa once apiece, and it was during this time that Irish representatives were asked to join the party. Thus was the format of a tour established; every four-ish years, a coach picked some players from all four countries (from 1910 they were selected by a committee of four nations), they headed off to either South Africa or New Zealand and played some rugby amidst general mucking around. As time went by, another fixture of these tours became losing; the Lions lost every single series between 1903 and 1955, and didn’t win one proper until 1971. Even provincial matches, against sides often shorn of star quality, were frequently lost. This wasn’t so much because the tourists weren’t good players, or even because of the issues concerning modern Lions tours of how fast a squad is able to gel or the touring schedule, but really thanks to amateurism.

In our modern rugby age of protein shakes and gym schedules it’s often easy to forget just how dedicated the ‘old farts’ who used to run the home unions were to the concept of amateurism (and not just because it made them a fair old slice of cash). These people didn’t think that ‘it’s not the winning, but the taking part that counts’ was for the losers on sports day- this was the core of their sporting philosophy. These were the days when players could be banned from ever attending a rugby match again just for accepting cash to play, and when the greatest shame imaginable was to be sent off. The score didn’t matter to the home unions in those day; a tour was really little more than a paid-for sporting holiday once every few years, and a Lions tour (as they were nicknamed from 1924 onwards) was no different. Down south, victory was more than just nice when it happened, but something to actively be sought. The southern hemisphere were the first unions to sanction the appointment of coaches (as late as the 1970s, the Scottish Rugby Union couldn’t bring themselves to create the job title of ‘coach’, instead going with ‘advisor to the captain’), and all in all had a more professional approach to the game- and it showed in the results. To be sure, there were several cases of it running close to the wire, but even the creme de la creme of northern hemisphere rugby could rarely manage more than one test win out of four. Of the four (and there were only four) tours the Lions didn’t lose throughout the 20th century, one was in the professional era (1997), one required all the guile of the great Cliff Morgan and all the total inability to kick of Jack van der Schyff just to salvage a draw (1955), and even the famous 1974 tour, in which the Lions didn’t lose a game, came about as a result of pitting the greatest players from Northern hemisphere rugby’s (read “mostly Wales'”) golden age against a South African outfit who were far from their country’s greatest side and whose selectors lost the plot so completely that they ended up playing an uncapped No. 8 (Gerrie Sonnekus) at scrum-half in the third test. Yes, the ’74 Lions may have been, as some put it, the greatest ever rugby side to set foot on a pitch, but they sure as hell could have had trickier opposition. To my mind, of all the amateur Lions tours only the 1971 tour, in which the Lions triumphed over the legendary Colin Meads’ formidable All Blacks outfit, can be dubbed a definite victory from the men north of the equator.

Those days of amateurism are long gone now. Players are professional and on big contracts whilst rugby itself is big business, and the Lions even more so (HSBC’s sponsorship deal for the 2013 tour is rumoured to be in the region of £7-8 million). Nowadays, the Lions face the problems of professional sport when trying to put one over on the southern hemisphere giants; those of forming a team from a collection of individuals in a shortened tour itinerary, injury worries and seemingly always having to play the most on-form of the three. But what I hope hasn’t changed are the things that make a Lions tour, or indeed any tour, so special; the adventure and the stories. Call me an old romantic, but one of the reasons I love rugby is the way its players still manage to enjoy themselves and mess around amidst all the chaos of a professional sporting life, that they can still go out for a drink and still be a bit stupid now and again. Long may it continue- especially on Lions tours.

An Opera Posessed

My last post left the story of JRR Tolkein immediately after his writing of his first bestseller; the rather charming, lighthearted, almost fairy story of a tale that was The Hobbit. This was a major success, and not just among the ‘children aged between 6 and 12’ demographic identified by young Rayner Unwin; adults lapped up Tolkein’s work too, and his publishers Allen & Unwin were positively rubbing their hands in glee. Naturally, they requested a sequel, a request to which Tolkein’s attitude appears to have been along the lines of ‘challenge accepted’.

Even holding down the rigours of another job, and even accounting for the phenomenal length of his finished product, the writing of a book is a process that takes a few months for a professional writer (Dame Barbara Cartland once released 25 books in the space of a year, but that’s another story), and perhaps a year or two for an amateur like Tolkein. He started writing the book in December 1937, and it was finally published 18 years later in 1955.

This was partly a reflection of the difficulties Tolkein had in publishing his work (more on that later), but this also reflects the measured, meticulous and very serious approach Tolkein took to his writing. He started his story from scratch, each time going in a completely different direction with an entirely different plot, at least three times. His first effort, for instance, was due to chronicle another adventure of his protagonist Bilbo from The Hobbit, making it a direct sequel in both a literal and spiritual sense. However, he then remembered about the ring Bilbo found beneath the mountains, won (or stolen, depending on your point of view) from the creature Gollum, and the strange power it held; not just invisibility, as was Bilbo’s main use for it, but the hypnotic effect it had on Gollum (he even subsequently rewrote that scene for The Hobbit‘s second edition to emphasise that effect). He decided that the strange power of the ring was a more natural direction to follow, and so he wrote about that instead.

Progress was slow. Tolkein went months at a time without working on the book, making only occasional, sporadic yet highly focused bouts of progress. Huge amounts were cross-referenced or borrowed from his earlier writings concerning the mythology, history & background of Middle Earth, Tolkein constantly trying to make his mythic world feel and, in a sense, be as real as possible, but it was mainly due to the influence of his son Christopher, who Tolkein would send chapters to whilst he was away fighting the Second World War in his father’s native South Africa, that the book ever got finished at all. When it eventually did, Tolkein had been working the story of Bilbo’s son Frodo and his adventure to destroy the Ring of Power for over 12 years. His final work was over 1000 pages long, spread across six ‘books’, as well as being laden with appendices to explain & offer background information, and he called it The Lord of The Rings (in reference to his overarching antagonist, the Dark Lord Sauron).

A similar story had, incidentally, been attempted once before; Der Ring des Nibelungen is an opera (well, four operas) written by German composer Richard Wagner during the 19th century, traditionally performed over the course of four consecutive nights (yeah, you have to be pretty committed to sit through all of that) and also known as ‘The Ring Cycle’- it’s where ‘Ride of The Valkyries’ comes from. The opera follows the story of a ring, made from the traditionally evil Rhinegold (gold panned from the Rhine river), and the trail of death, chaos and destruction it leaves in its wake between its forging & destruction. Many commentators have pointed out the close similarities between the two, and as a keen follower of Germanic mythology Tolkein certainly knew the story, but Tolkein rubbished any suggestion that he had borrowed from it, saying “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases”. You can probably work out my approximate personal opinion from the title of this post, although I wouldn’t read too much into it.

Even once his epic was finished, the problems weren’t over. Once finished, he quarrelled with Allen & Unwin over his desire to release LOTR in one volume, along with his still-incomplete Silmarillion (that he wasn’t allowed to may explain all the appendices). He then turned to Collins, but they claimed his book was in urgent need of an editor and a license to cut (my words, not theirs, I should add). Many other people have voiced this complaint since, but Tolkein refused and ordered Collins to publish by 1952. This they failed to do, so Tolkein wrote back to Allen & Unwin and eventually agreed to publish his book in three parts; The Fellowship of The Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of The King (a title Tolkein, incidentally, detested because it told you how the book ended).

Still, the book was out now, and the critics… weren’t that enthusiastic. Well, some of them were, certainly, but the book has always had its detractors among the world of literature, and that was most certainly the case during its inception. The New York Times criticised Tolkein’s academic approach, saying he had “formulated a high-minded belief in the importance of his mission as a literary preservationist, which turns out to be death to literature itself”, whilst others claimed it, and its characters in particular, lacked depth. Even Hugo Dyson, one of Tolkein’s close friends and a member of his own literary group, spent public readings of the book lying on a sofa shouting complaints along the lines of “Oh God, not another elf!”. Unlike The Hobbit, which had been a light-hearted children’s story in many ways, The Lord of The Rings was darker & more grown up, dealing with themes of death, power and evil and written in a far more adult style; this could be said to have exposed it to more serious critics and a harder gaze than its predecessor, causing some to be put off by it (a problem that wasn’t helped by the sheer size of the thing).

However, I personally am part of the other crowd, those who have voiced their opinions in nearly 500 five-star reviews on Amazon (although one should never read too much into such figures) and who agree with the likes of CS  Lewis, The Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times of the time that “Here is a book that will break your heart”, that it is “among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century” and that “the English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and those who are going to read them”. These are the people who have shown the truth in the review of the New York Herald Tribune: that Tolkein’s masterpiece was and is “destined to outlast our time”.

But… what exactly is it that makes Tolkein’s epic so special, such a fixture; why, even years after its publication as the first genuinely great work of fantasy, it is still widely regarded as the finest work the genre has ever produced? I could probably write an entire book just to try and answer that question (and several people probably have done), but to me it was because Tolkein understood, absolutely perfectly and fundamentally, exactly what he was trying to write. Many modern fantasy novels try to be uber-fantastical, or try to base themselves around an idea or a concept, in some way trying to find their own level of reality on which their world can exist, and they often find themselves in a sort of awkward middle ground, but Tolkein never suffered that problem because he knew that, quite simply, he was writing a myth, and he knew exactly how that was done. Terry Pratchett may have mastered comedic fantasy, George RR Martin may be the king of political-style fantasy, but only JRR Tolkein has, in recent times, been able to harness the awesome power of the first source of story; the legend, told around the campfire, of the hero and the villain, of the character defined by their virtues over their flaws, of the purest, rawest adventure in the pursuit of saving what is good and true in this world. These are the stories written to outlast the generations, and Tolkein’s mastery of them is, to me, the secret to his masterpiece.

Where do we come from?

In the sport of rugby at the moment (don’t worry, I won’t stay on this topic for too long I promise), there is rather a large debate going on- one that has been echoing around the game for at least a decade now, but that seems to be coming ever closer to the fore. This is the issue of player nationality, namely the modern trend for foreign players to start playing for sides other than those of their birth. The IRB’s rules currently state that one is eligible to play for a country having either lived there for the past three years or if you, either of your parents or any of your grandparents were born there (and so long as you haven’t played for another international side). This state of affairs that has allowed a myriad of foreigners, mainly South Africans (Mouritz Botha, Matt Stevens, Brad Barritt) and New Zealanders (Dylan Hartley, Thomas Waldrom, Riki Flutey), as well as a player all of whose family have played for Samoa (Manu Tuilagi), to play for England in recent years. In fact, Scotland recently played host to an almost comic state of affairs as both the SRU and the media counted down the days until electric Dutch wing Tim Visser, long hailed as the solution to the Scots’ try scoring problems, was eligible to play for Scotland on residency grounds.

These rules were put in place after the ‘Grannygate’ scandal during the early noughties. Kiwi coach Graham Henry, hailed as ‘The Great Redeemer’ by Welsh fans after turning their national side around and leading them to eleven successive victories, had ‘found’ a couple of New Zealanders (Shane Howarth and Brett Sinkinson) with Welsh grandparents to help bolster his side. However, it wasn’t long before a bit of investigative journalism found out that there was no Welsh connection whatsoever, and the whole thing had been a fabrication by Henry and his team. Both players were stopped playing for Wales, and amidst the furore the IRB brought in their new rules.  Sinkinson later qualified on residency and won six further caps for the Welsh. Howarth, having previously played for New Zealand, never played international rugby again.

It might seem odd, then, that this issue is still considered a scandal, despite the IRB having supposedly ‘sorted it out’. But it remains a hugely contentious issue, dividing those who think that Mouritz Botha’s thick South African accent should not be allowed in a white shirt and those who point out that he apparently considers himself English and has as much a right as anyone to compete for the shirt. This is not just an issue in rugby either- during the Olympics, there was a decent amount of criticism for the presence of ‘plastic Brits’ in the Great Britain squad (many of them sporting strong American accents), something that has been present since the days of hastily anglicised South African Zola Budd. In some ways athletics is even more dodgy, as athletes are permitted to change the country they represent (take Bernard Lagat, who originally represented his native Kenya before switching to the USA).

The problem is that nationality is not a simple black & white dividing line, especially in today’s multicultural, well-travelled world. Many people across the globe now hold a dual nationality and a pair of legal passports, and it would be churlish to suggest that they ‘belong’ any more to one country than another. Take Mo Farah, for example, one of Britain’s heroes after the games, and a British citizen- despite being born in, and having all his family come from, Somaliland (technically speaking this is an independent, semi-autonomous state, but is internationally only recognised as part of Somalia). And just as we Britons exalt the performance of ‘our man’, in his home country the locals are equally ecstatic about the performance of a man they consider Somali, whatever country’s colours he runs in.

The thing is, Mo Farah, to the British public at least, seems British. We are all used to our modern, multicultural society, especially in London, so his ethnic origin barely registers as ‘foreign’ any more, and he has developed a strong English accent since he first moved here aged 9. On the other hand, both of Shana Cox’s parents were born in Britain, but was raised in Long Island and has a notable American accent, leading many to dub her a ‘plastic Brit’ after she lead off the 4 x 400m women’s relay team for Great Britain. In fact, you would be surprised how important accent is to our perception of someone’s nationality, as it is the most obvious indicator of where a person’s development as a speaker and a person occurred.

A simultaneously both interesting and quite sad demonstration of this involves a pair of Scottish rappers I saw in the paper a few years ago (and whose names I have forgotten). When they first auditioned as rappers, they did so in their normal Scots accents- and were soundly laughed out of the water. Seriously, their interviewers could barely keep a straight face as they rejected them out of hand purely based on the sound of their voice. Their solution? To adopt American accents, not just for their music but for their entire life. They rapped in American, spoke in American, swore, drank, partied & had sex all in these fake accents. People they met often used to be amazed by the perfect Scottish accents these all-american music stars were able to impersonate. And it worked, allowing them to break onto the music scene and pursue their dreams as musicians, although it exacted quite a cost. At home in Scotland, one of them asked someone at the train station about the timetable. Initially unable to understand the slight hint of distaste he could hear in their homely Scots lilt, it was about a minute before he realised he had asked the question entirely in his fake accent.

(Interestingly, Scottish music stars The Proclaimers, who the rappers were unfavourably compared to in their initial interview, were once asked about the use of their home accents in their music as opposed to the more traditional American of the music industry, and were so annoyed at the assumption that they ‘should’ be singing in an accent that wasn’t theirs that they even made a song (‘Flatten all the Vowels’) about the incident.)

This story highlights perhaps the key issue when considering the debate of nationality- that what we perceive as where someone’s from will often not tell us the whole story. It is not as simple as ‘oh so-and-so is clearly an American, why are they running for Britain?’, because what someone ‘clearly is’ and what they actually are can often be very different. At the very first football international, England v Scotland, most of the Scottish team were selected on the basis of having Scottish-sounding names. We can’t just be judging people on what first meets the eye.

Who is most impressive?

As one or two of you may have noticed, the Olympics are almost over, prompting the requisite large party and giving some Brazilians a chance to wear odd clothes, dance about and generally play to stereotypes (probably- I’m feeling a little cynical today). However, in not too long a time that other, perhaps more understated, tetrannual sporting party will get underway: the Olympics’ disabled cousin, the Paralympics.

In some ways this will be a spiritual homecoming for the Paralympic Games- founded in 1948 for ex-servicemen with spinal injuries after the Second World War, it was the brainchild of Dr. Ludvig Guttmann of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Great Britain (the sports centre at Stoke Mandeville is still called the Guttmann centre in his honour, and one of the two mascots for London 2012 is called Mandeville). Guttmann was a Jew, and had emigrated from his native Germany in 1939 to escape persecution from the Nazi government of the time. He founded the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke in 1944, and founded the ‘Stoke Mandeville Games’ (to coincide with the 1948 London Olympics) in response to his feeling that sport could be use as a form of therapy for the seriously disabled, giving them purpose and self-respect. His vision was a great success, ballooning in size and popularity until, in 1960, it became officially tied to the Olympics proper (it wasn’t called the Paralympics until 1984). Guttmann himself was showered in praise for his work, being awarded (among other things) a CBE, OBE, and a knighthood in 1966.

Since then, the Paralympic movement has continued to inspire and amaze. Since 1960 non-war veterans have been eligible to compete, and multiple categories of disability have been entering since 1976. For many, the very existence of the Games has been a beacon of hope for lives torn apart by accident or injury, something to focus their otherwise unspent athletic energies upon, and thus fulfilling Guttmann’s vision of sport as a therapy. For a special few, they have been a springboard to their being able to compete amongst able-bodied counterparts, in sports ranging from sprinting to shooting to swimming.

Paralympians, obviously, do not have the physical capacity to match able-bodied competitors in the majority of situations, and as such, on a purely numerical basis, they are ‘less impressive’. Human nature dictates that we thus find them less interesting and compelling to watch for an extended period of time, a problem compounded by the sheer number of different classifications, leading to a huge number of medals and competitions and thus a confusing and some might say unfocused set of events that becomes impossible to keep track of (there are, for instance, six different classes of cerebral palsy 100m sprinting, giving the athletes concerned 6 times less attention, 6 times less focus and interest and making their medals seem only a sixth as valuable).  All this means that the amount of funding and (especially) media coverage offered to the Paralympics is significantly less than the Olympic equivalents, despite a great advance in recent years, and that they are simply not taken quite as seriously as Usain Bolt & Co.

All of which begs the obvious question: are Olympians really better than their disabled counterparts, or do the mental battles, financial struggles, and management of trying to hold down a paying job before we even consider the crippling physical impairment enough to render Paralympic Athletes even more impressive?

This question ultimately boils down to a question of which is more impressive- being the best in the world, or being merely far, far better than the rest of us mere mortals despite having to overcome. To consider an example, the world record for 100m sprinting in the most severe class of blindness is 11.03 seconds, less than a second and a half slower than Usain Bolt’s fastest ever time and far faster than anyone I happen to know- and this is done whilst entirely unable to see where you are going.

OK, you might say, but blindness doesn’t actually affect physical capability, so what about something that does. Consider the shot put, which involves throwing a large metal ball weighing 16lb (7.26kg) as far as possible with a rigidly monitored technique. 7kg is a surprisingly ungainly mass at the best of times, but when compacted into a small, dense ball thrown in one hand it becomes even harder to handle. I have thrown a shot in school, much lighter than an Olympic one, and got it about 2 metres. Karmel Kardjena is quadriplegic, as in all limbs severely damaged to the point of muscles not working properly, and can throw it 11.

These are just examples I can find on Wikipedia that make for a good comparison- I’m sure a dedicated student of the Paralympics could quote dozens more. Perhaps the most famous Paralympian of all, South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius (aka Bladerunner) won a silver medal in the 2011 World Championships INSERT BIT ABOUT 2012 WHEN HE’S DONE IT (competitions he entered despite a 2008 ruling, which he later successfully appealed, that the carbon fibre replacements for his amputated forelegs were giving him an unfair advantage). He is competing amongst the very best in the world, regardless of the fact that he has no calves or feet, and he is representative of the sheer quality that is surely present among Paralympians.

However, in order to judge our argument effectively, we must still consider how impressive our able bodied athletes are. I have already dedicated an entire post to just how superhuman these people are, but it’s worth taking another look around at the plethora of talent on display over the last fortnight to truly comprehend that. To take a parallel with Kardjena, let us consider the equivalent men’s shot put record. We must, of course, bear in mind that able bodied athletes are capable of not only taking a hopping run-up but also twisting the full trunk of their body, but even so, their achievements are staggering- the world record is over 23 metres (interestingly enough still shorter than the shortest discus throw in Olympic history, at 25).

So then, which is better? Well, to be honest it really comes down to a matter of opinion. Some may believe that the sheer quality of Olympic athletes cannot be made up for by the disabilities of Paralympians, whilst others will say that they more than cover for it and that the Paralympics is the home of real sporting greats. But, in many ways, this argument is entirely irrelevant, if only because we could argue until the end of time and not reach an answer. The real fact to acknowledge is simply that these Paralympians are clearly not here ‘just to take part’- they are serious athletes going in serious competition and capable of seriously amazing things. Whether Oscar Pistorius is better or worse than Usain Bolt matters not so long as we are all agreed that both of them are so great, so beyond what any of the rest of us can do, that they deserve every ounce of admiration we can muster. As the father of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, famously said: “The important thing in life is not the victory but the contest; the essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well”

And sorry for the rather lame cop-out