Olympic Thoughts 26.7.21

It’s a great feeling to wake up, turn on the TV, and find out that GB won THREE gold medals overnight! But it also disappoints me a bit that I wasn’t awake to watch them all in real time. Insomnia never strikes when I want it to.

The scheduling is very annoying. The good stuff starts as I’m going to bed, and the later finals happen when I’m already at work. Roll on 2024, when the Games are in Paris and it should be easier to watch it all. Hell – I may even try and get tickets and hop across the Channel to watch it!

Table Tennis is the weirdest sport to try and watch on telly, and must be the hardest thing to cover as a broadcaster. It’s all so fast and so closed in. It’s like trying to show a chess match, but a version of chess where they throw the pieces at each other. If you copy the camera angle they use for real tennis, the players get in the way. If you set the cameras to the side of the table, it’s impossible to see where the ball is going when they spin it.

In this world of over-practiced post-match interviews with media-savvy professionals, it’s nice to see someone win an unexpected victory and be so overwhelmed that they forget how to speak English. Tom Pidcock – who no-one outside the world of cycling knew existed at the weekend – won the Mountain Biking Gold Medal and was so emotional he couldn’t put three words together. Wonderful stuff.

Lutalo Muhammad (the taekwondo summariser) is a brilliant pundit and brilliant ambassador for his sport. I hope we see loads more of him post-Olympics because he’s terrific and so much more engaging than most of the television ‘personalities’ we see polluting BBC screen time.

RC 26-7-21