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‘Olympic fever sweeps the country’: it must be so if you watch the BBC. This is a very difficult time for me as I am a recovering ‘Olympiaholic’ or one formerly caught up in the cult that is the Olympics. Confession is part and parcel of the recovery process so I am told, so here goes.
For just over 20 years I spent a considerable amount of money (some of which I didn’t actually possess) and a ridiculous amount of quality time and emotion, pushing, encouraging, bullying my younger son to become an Olympian. This addictive behaviour helped to damage a business, a marriage and my relationship with my elder son (whom I painfully neglected) while hindering a healthy loving rapport with the younger boy.
Why? The standard response is that one creates a surrogate for the failed self. I have been accused of trying to ‘implant’ my own unfulfilled ambitions into my son’s life. Rubbish?
Having been a competitive swimmer from the age of seven (he also was good at judo, football, cricket and later basketball) by the time he was 14 he had become a record-breaking, elite swimmer. So then we/I planned. I enabled our club to bring in a professional coach, he went on expensive summer training camps (Florida mostly) and at 17 he made the final at the Manchester Commonwealth Games. I had floppy disks full of training times and programmes, results from around the world, information about all kinds of ‘future Olympian camps’ and US colleges where he could swim and study.
Then his coach in a moment of hot-tempered but provoked madness literally jumped on him in the pool and severely damaged the boy’s shoulder. Months and months of expensive therapy produced frustration and drop-out. He missed the Athens games. He’d had enough. Girls and a normal student life was his goal. But after a disappointing first year at university he wanted back in the pool. It is a strange environment devoid of the noisy group dynamics of football, just the semi-silent black-line and the water in which the swimmer attempts to assimilate the ancient features of the fish.
He was lucky for a change and was accepted in the swimming programme of a good English university. He progressed slowly. Beijing was now the goal.
Meanwhile his mother worked three jobs (I was doing two and the ‘swimming management’) plus others of her family chipped in with support and the all important money. (Some number-cruncher somewhere will have the sums, but £60-£90,000 to gain qualification and double/triple that for a medal is my modest estimate). A critical part of any drama is the character’s relationship with his environment so it needs to be said that his Afro-Caribbean mother meant that he had entered a sport – swimming – that is hyper-white at the elite Olympian level.
In the cold winter of 2007 in even colder Romania he did the vital qualifying time. I remember it well as I had lost some faith and never felt it was possible in the cold of winter. But it is a sublime moment in any Olympic journey – the eureka moment for the thousands who attempt the great sacrifice. The 300 or so gold medals won at the games are extraordinary. But gaining the qualifying time or distance or weight or height is almost equally transforming. It is for the initiated sportsperson a glorious rite of passage, ‘a door opening into another world where only the monks of Olympus tread’ and lots of other silly hyperbole stuff.
On the other hand for those many, many thousands, perhaps millions who try desperately hard, and sacrifice too much and yet do not make it, the result can be dangerously self-punishing. (Strangely his university coach was dismissed three months prior to the games and the boy was lost in a miasma of surrogate coaches and programmes. Even more extraordinary, partly due to the enormous personal pressure, the coach went under the knife and undertook a transgender operation.) But our son did make the journey to Beijing in 2008.
But why? I read Kenneth Roy’s piece (24 July) and dismissed it as coming from one who had never dreamed of Mt Olympus; who was an unbeliever a damned agnostic. I read it a second time and listened to my inner self and came through the bitter alchemy of doubt of the apostate to ask myself ‘why’ again and again.
I will sympathise with those are still faithful adherents, still addicted, as I sit in my wee rented but and ben in Carluke and watch and ask: what price have they paid for this indulgence?
Thom Cross is a writer. His novel ‘The Scottish Swimmer of Colombia’ is available on Amazon.
