Michael Hutchinson

I don’t really want this blog to become just a regular whinge. It may already be too late. It’s just that if you’re a bike rider you do sometimes feel a little unloved. My local village newsletter flopped through the letterbox yesterday morning.

This month, among the local news (there is a pothole on Church Street – be careful) and the local churches’ propaganda, is a complaint about inconsiderate cyclists using the footpaths that run beside the busy A-road through the village. Which, I’m bound to say, would feel less like persecution if the footpaths weren’t designated and signed as shared-used paths.

It would feel even further from persecution if the main road itself was not the most dangerous place to ride a bike I’ve ever seen. I’ve mentioned this before, and often, but if you lived here you too would find that you talk of little else. I’ve ridden round Hyde Park Corner on a folding bike at night with less concern for my longevity that I have ever managed on the village High Street. Just in case the speeding lorries were going to miss you, the council has installed traffic islands every hundred yards or so to narrow the road and make damn sure they don’t. I’ve had more near misses and arguments in the 800 yards to the paper-shop than I’ve had in the rest of the county put together.

It’s the same everywhere else – you can ride on the shared-use paths and get shouted at to get onto the road, or you can ride on the road and get shouted at to get onto the path. I usually go for the road, because most of the time I reckon it’s safer. That and the fact that the shared-use paths are often rutted, strewn with glass, and sometimes so narrow that there isn’t space to pass a pedestrian.

None of this is really news to anyone. What worries me is I let myself get far too annoyed by these things. It’s similar when I’m out on my bike – someone chucking something at me from a passing car, even if it’s as innocuous as a plastic bottle – will irritate me for the next hour, when more laid back friends are capable of ignoring it altogether.

I know that I’m not alone in this – from my Cycling Weekly column, I know that nothing generates reader emails like writing about road safety, or the hostility of other road users. It’s tempting to write about things like that every week, simply because it’s always nice to know that someone is reading. But it doesn’t half start to get you down after a while.

So. More thoughts about spring, birdies, daffodils, bunny rabbits, and the sheer joy of the open air.

Until the next time I’m belted up the arse by a bottle, obviously. Probably tomorrow afternoon.

For the last week, I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics like it’s my job. I’ve been doing my job as if it’s the washing up. And the washing up, well, just take a guess. I’m simply entranced by the various means devised of sliding down a hill, while flapping your arms to keep your balance. If I knew why I’m so fascinated, I suspect I’d know a lot more about myself.

It may just be that, like a cat, I simply like brightly coloured objects moving about on a plainly coloured background – see below for an embarrassingly large number of entries celebrating golf. Or it may be – golf again – that the less I know about a sport, the more I like it, just like my late Great Aunt Florence, who spent her declining years watching any form of televised competition she could find, from five-nations rugby to Bullseye, without ever really having the faintest idea what was going on.

Or it may just be the simplicity of the whole thing. Mostly you only have to watch one brightly coloured object at a time, while watching for the split times. And for the most part, it’s reasonably obvious whether or not things are going well. Man in Lycra flashes past the camera in a low tuck. (‘He’s going for it!’ says the informed commentator. Even I can see that.) Or, perhaps, man in Lycra enters the shot at high speed, upside down four feet off the ground and proceeds to drive himself into the snow like a nail, leaving only his skis showing. (“Oooh, that hasn’t gone at all the way he wanted,’ says the commentator, as some Canadians extract the victim, to hopefully dust him down and send him on his way.)

I even like the fact that things like half-pipe have made a virtue out of manoeuvres that look to me like a crash right up to the point where the victim’s snowboard comes bottom centre at just the right moment for them to ski away.

I know all this is based on ignorance, indeed I know I’m saying just the kind of stuff that sometimes grates when an outsider writes it about my own sport – though I like to think I’m fairly tolerant up to the point where someone suggests killing us.

But maybe the best thing about it isn’t the ignorance, it’s the innocence. When a snowboarder falls out of the sky over the half pipe in the style of a skydiver who’s parachute has failed, gets up, smiles for the camera, and slides away humming to themselves, I can convince myself that they’re driven more by the pleasure of the thing than anything else. It may well be so, or at least, more so that for a lot of other sports, but I’m almost certainly wrong in most of the time. For me to be right, they’d also have to be not really competitively driven, and that’s not how you get selected for the Olympics. I can make myself believe it, though, and that appeals immensely.

Ok, here’s a question to which I’m sure I should know the answer, but don’t. Let me take you back to the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony last summer. Lin Miaoke, you will doubtless remember, was the nine-year-old girl whose singing apparently accompanied the arrival of the Chinese flag in the Bird’s Nest Stadium.

You will doubtless also remember that she was miming – the song was actually sung by seven-year-old Yang Peiyi, who won a competition to take part in the ceremony but who was judged by a member of the Politburo to be too ugly to be seen representing China. (Incidentally, Yang Peiyi had already replaced another girl who was apparently even less visually suited to the job.)

There was something of an outcry, and petitions to let Yang Peiyi sing at the closing ceremony. All jolly splendid. But here is the question: Just why is it more important to be fair to ‘ugly’ kids than to tone-deaf ones? Maybe Lin Miaoke was just as wounded that her voice wasn’t acceptable?

I know the traditional answer is that how well you sing is down to years of hard work and dedication, it’s something you can improve, so you have a choice about it. Your appearance is just a given.

This ‘choice’ logic is the same that’s used to determine what groups attract protection from discrimination. (Just while we’re in the area, I may as well point out that this is why cyclists never have much joy in arguing that some of the abuse we get from newspaper columnists is equivalent to racism. You can’t stop being black, but you can stop being a cyclist.)

But with seven-year-olds? Most kids I ever remember being good at singing just were – it wasn’t something they’d worked at, not at that age.

The real answer I suppose would to have been to let Yang Peiyi mime to the singing of Lin Miaoke at the closing ceremony. I wonder why no one suggested that.

The British love an underdog. Apparently. I’m not sure that the miscellaneous indigenous peoples who were wiped out to make space for the British Empire would have seen it that way, but hey ho, never mind.

 I mention this because Wimbledon approaches, when all of a sudden people with no real interest in any other sport pop out of the woodwork to spend hours a day flipping between simultaneous tennis coverage on BBCs 1 and 2. In reality it’s not just that they don’t like sport, they don’t even like tennis (or they’d watch the French Open too). What they like is looking at nice green grass, and the Duchess of Kent’s hat. Ah! How relaxing.

 For the most part, they support anyone other than the player who’s expected to win, unless it was Tim Henman, in which case they supported his opponent so that they could continue to make jokes about Tim being a loser.

 I’ve never quite got this. It’s very egalitarian, I suppose, and I guess that by supporting the guy who’s probably going to lose you can feel that you’re doing your bit to prolong the match and increase the entertainment value. But it’s still a strange way to go about it.

 I’m a fan of the best player winning. It’s the same in other sports – golf, for example. Or even, to the extent that I care, football. (Well, who I support in football is the result of a more complicated algorithm, mainly revolving around how much dodgy cash clubs have access to.) I like the players with the talent, and those who’ve put in the work, to win.

 I know this means I have a dull, predictable outlook on life. Although it’s a view I share with the French – who supported Roger Federer at the French Open, even when he was against a French player. In France, this isn’t being dull and predictable; it’s being knowledgeable about the game, or respecting the best player. I think I like that way of doing it. 

I’m watching the London Marathon over the top of my laptop screen. We’re three hours in now, so it’s all about men in dog suits, women on stilts, and Gordon Ramsey. The winners are back in the hotel, no doubt leafing through a Mercedes-Benz catalogue.

I did the London Marathon, years ago. I entered the ballot on a whim after watching the previous year’s race, and a few months later, to my horror, got a letter telling me I’d been ‘lucky’. Clearly a rather marginal use of the word.

I knew nothing at all about distance running. I looked up the world record for the race, and decided that three hours would be a nice comfortable target. It was, in truth, wildly optimistic.

I bought a new pair of trainers, and got busy. Looking back at it now, the training was pretty basic. I just went on a few runs. About the only clever thing I did was a longer run once a week – but even then, only up to about 15 miles.

I more or less made the three hours – I missed by only a couple of minutes.  But boy did I suffer for it.  I exploded somewhere around Tower Bridge on the way back from Docklands. The last five miles lasted for decades. I remember passing an 800m to go sign, where a woman shouted ‘nearly there!’ to me. I stopped to point out that I still had 800 sodding meters to go. I swore I’d never do another marathon. And I have every intention of sticking to this.

The only thing that ever made me feel better about my marathon experience was a friend, a much better runner, who on one occasion passed mile 23 in 2.18 – heading for a comfortable sub 2.40. At this point he hit the wall to end all walls.  He covered the remaining distance in a dazed 45 minutes – with runners going more than twice as fast as he was strobing past on both sides.

I bring all this pain up for purposes of handy comparison. I went to see Bob Dylan at the O2 Arena last night.  The marathon was more fun. It wasn’t nearly as good as this review makes it sound.  And the review doesn’t make it sound good.

One of my more significant pleasures in life is watching golf on television. I’m not really quite sure why. My partner thinks it’s simply that I find the colour soothing. She has developed an unkind theory that I’d be just as happy watching a rectangular bit of green cardboard.

I’ve never played golf, not beyond the mini variety. I did have one lesson on a driving range when I was about 11 – but it ended badly. In one of the little concrete pens, the instructor put a ball on the tee, handed me a club, and invited me to take a swipe at it. I did so, with much enthusiasm.

I hit the ball with the toe of the club. It took off at 90 degrees to the intended direction. It ricocheted off the wall of the pen, off the ceiling, off the opposite wall, and generally behaved like a firework in a phone box.

When he’d got up from his prone position on the Astroturf, the instructor snatched the club back, retuned to me the fee for the lesson, and told me never to return.

I think part of the appeal of watching it on TV is that I don’t really want to do it, because I know I’d be dreadful at it. And I love watching (not in an unkind way) some of the best sportsmen in the world making mistakes that don’t need a commentator to explain them. There is something very satisfying about watching Ernie Els hitting his drive into a tree, or Tiger Woods chipping straight over the 18^th green into the crowd, and sending spectators scattering in every direction.

And I don’t think I’d get that from a bit of card.

I rode my first bike race of the year on Saturday last, the snappily titled VTTA East Anglian Open 25. It was near Newmarket, so just down the road from home. That, of course, didn’t stop me being late, nor did it mean it didn’t take me three goes to find the headquarters.

When I got there, well honestly you would think I’d never been to a bike race before. I collected my number, but forgot to sign on. I went back to sign on, but this time I forgot to take my racing kit in with me so I could get changed. When I finally sorted myself out, got my kit, and got changed, I discovered that the skinsuit I’d chucked into my bag was the one with the broken zip that I had meant to throw out last August. And after I’d finally teased the zip up, tooth-by-agonising-tooth, I remembered I’d forgotten to put the strap for my heart-rate monitor on first.

For a final flourish, I put my helmet on before I took off my warm up top, and the then tried to pull the top off over the helmet, got the whole lot hopelessly tangled up, and ended up staggering blindly round the car park like a monster Russell T. Davis had rejected from Dr Who for just being too damn silly looking.

Apart from that it was just fine.

There has been an awful lot of discussion about women’s sport in the last week or so – starting last weekend with Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for culture, media and sport. (From whom we seem to have been hearing an awful lot lately. And, yes, ‘when I hear the word sport, I reach for my culture.’ Come to think of it, why are they two different things?)

Burnham was critical of the amount of coverage of women’s sport on TV – in particular the England women cricketers winning the World Cup to a blaze of no publicity at all. Nicole Cooke has complained in the past about the comparable disparity in the coverage of men’s and women’s cycling. And they both have a point.

The problem is that no one has worked out just what sport, and what coverage of sport, is supposed to be for. It might be as Burnham suggested, to provide inspirational role models. In his case he’s particularly concerned by teenage girls, who apparently give up sport so that they can chase boys. (I have to say that that never happened in my day. In my day, they gave up sport… and that was it.)

Alternatively, coverage might be a reward for a good performance – which sounds a little odd until you think about just how often complaints about sports coverage are framed in terms of ‘I think they deserved better.” It was also part of Burnham’s comments. But this is a non-starter, for the simple reason that the reward for a good performance is that you win your event. Press coverage is for the benefit of the reader or viewer, not the athlete. If you’re doing sport just so you get into the papers, you’ve got it way wrong.

The truth of it is that, at the moment, sports coverage is more or less governed by a free market. That means it’s straight entertainment. Papers and TV stations will cover what they can sell – last weekend it was pretty clear that the big selling sports were going to be rugby and football.

Unfortunately, no government minister in history ever succeeded in persuading, by simple exhortation, a commercial organisation to give up revenue for a greater good. If he wanted to produce legislation, I suppose he could – and he could start with the ‘Crown Jewels” list of sporting events required to be free-to-air on terrestrial TV. At the moment there are 10 events, and the only specific women’s event is the Wimbledon final.

If he wanted to be more radical, he could require that equal amounts of coverage be given to men’s and women’s sports – they did it for equal pay in the 1970s, and that was governed by a free market at the time too – but I really can’t see that happening.

The other problem is that it’s not really awfully clear that watching sport provides very much inspiration in the first place. Though a government minister is pretty unlikely to mention that doubt, since most of the justification for the London Olympic spending is that it’s going to make us a healthier nation.

It’s a great pity he’s so wrong. Because I entirely agree with him.