Michael Hutchinson

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.