The Paris Olympics and the BBC
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BBC presenters constantly praise the Paris Olympics. Presumably this is because the BBC is desperate not to offend the IOC. They didn’t criticise the IOC when it gave the 2014 Winter Olympics to Putin’s Russia, nor when it gave China the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2022 Winter Olympics. The BBC could also surely have done more to explore the issue of the two women boxers whose gender was called into question by critics, despite the self-righteous protests of the IOC. The truth is that, like the BBC’s own coverage, the Paris Olympic Games were a mixed bag.
Another issue which was left largely untouched was the question of the rise of China in the Summer Olympics. It came top overall with 39 Gold medals, 27 Silvers and 24 Bronze medals, beating even the USA into second place. This included 12 medals in the swimming events. The rise of China in the Olympics is a fascinating story. It only broke into the top three for the first time in 2000. In 1984 it won 32 medals and none at all in the swimming events. That was the first year it took part in modern the Summer Olympics, except for the 1952 Helsinki games, when it only sent one competitor.
What explains China’s dramatic rise in Olympic sports, especially swimming? Listen to the BBC commentators and you will never know. Except when they briefly quoted British swimming star Adam Peaty, who accused the Chinese swimmers of being drugs cheats. Without any proper investigation by BBC reporters we may never know how true this is, but what else explains the meteoric rise of Chinese swimmers from no medals in 1984 to a dozen forty years later? During the same period the USA fell from 34 medals to 28 and Australia rose from 12 to 18.
This is part of another family of historical mysteries when it comes to the Olympics. Whatever happened to Germany? East German athletes, widely suspected of being drug cheats, used to break world records constantly and won Olympic medals regularly through the 1970s and 1980s. East Germany won no fewer than 66 medals in the 1972 Munich Olympics, including twenty in athletics alone. West Germany, the hosts, only won 11 athletics medals in the same Games. This year in Paris Germany won 31 medals, including just 4 in athletics, compared to 31 medals in athletics for East and West Germany just over 50 years ago. I never heard this decline mentioned once on the BBC. I wonder why?
Then there’s the issue of race in athletics. If you’re not Black, your chances of winning a medal in the sprint events are close to zero and have been for years. If you’re a long-distance runner (5000 metres, 10000 metres, 3000 metre steeplechase) your chances of winning a medal if you’re not from East Africa are not great either. The extraordinary Norwegian runner, Jakob Ingebrigtsen won the Men’s 5000 metres at Paris, but five out of the top seven in that race were from East Africa. White British middle distance runners (800 and 1500 metres) do much better. This change took off in the Mexico Olympics in 1968. Kenya won Gold in the Men’s 1,500 and 10,000 metres, Gold and Silver in the 3000 metre steeplechase, and Silver and Bronze in the Men’s 5000 metres, Ethiopia won Silver in the Men’s 10,000 metres and Gold in the Marathon. It was a revolution. In Melbourne in 1956 not a single African long-distance runner won a medal. These are huge changes. Then East African women joined the party. In Paris, Kenya and Ethiopia won 15 women’s athletics medals between them. These are not questions BBC commentators and presenters like to ask, so they don’t. You can see why.
Another odd absence was the number of sports stars at Paris with Covid: most famously, Noah Lyles had to be carried off the track in a wheelchair after the 200 metres final. A week earlier Adam Peaty tested positive less than 24 hours after claiming a swimming Silver medal. He said he first began feeling ill a day earlier, ahead of the 100-metre breaststroke final. The Australian delegation in Paris said five Covid-hit players on its women’s water polo team were clear to practise when they felt well enough to train. The media barely cared. Perhaps the athletes Lyles embraced so vigorously after the race cared a little more?
What does interest the commentators is the new emphasis on the family lives of British competitors. In the past, sports presenters and commentators weren’t interested in whether British sports stars had children, let alone in interviewing them about their children. Perhaps because sports executives, presenters and commentators were nearly all men. During the Paris Olympics there were films about and interviews with the great sportsmen and women, such as the swimmer Adam Peaty, the gymnast Max Whitlock and the rower Helen Glover, among others, in which their small children were very prominent. This was often deeply moving and it’s good to be reminded that this is one of the most important sacrifices that British sportsmen and women must make.
But it is also sometimes sentimental and part of the feminisation of TV sport, along with the growing number of female commuters, including most of the presenters (Jeanette Kwakye, Hazel Irvine, Claire Baldock, Gabby Logan) and many of the pundits. Perhaps this is an attempt to attract a larger female audience to the BBC’s sports coverage, including the Olympics, which is surely a good thing, along with the equally important rise of female sports stars and the greater focus on women’s sports including football, cricket and rugby.
It was also an Olympics full of farewells. The most emotional of all, of course, was Andy Murray. The BBC’s obsession with Murray (they not only cover the Olympics but also Wimbledon, of course) was boundless, though they hardly dared to point out that Murray and his Doubles partner Dan Evans only played one pair of well-known Doubles opponents, the Americans Paul and Fritz, and were roundly beaten by them, 6-2, 6-4, in the Quarter-Finals. But the ratings were terrific, almost as impressive as the BBC hype. Sadly, we will not see Murray play professional tennis again, nor will we see Helen Glover, who rowed in three Olympic Games, the gymnast Max Whitlock or, in all probability, the swimmer Adam Peaty. This all had an elegiac feel.
Finally, whatever the criticisms of the use of the Seine and the more controversial aspects of the opening ceremony, French security, at a time of great social unrest in France, was – at the time of writing – a triumph. Let’s hope for the same in LA in 2028.
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