Even as We Speak (55 page)

Could our Cathy, representing the repressed people of Australia, keep up with this display of muscle? Ever since World War II, Australia, haunted by the spectacle of American abundance, has had
to console itself with the thought that its own abundance is more justly distributed, yielding a better life. But then these super-cool black Yanks turn up in their designer shades and investment
footwear, flanked by their agents, accountants, chiropractors and manicurists. They tour town in rented Ferraris. They make our television interviewers sound inarticulate. It was good to hear that
NBC’s transmission of the Olympics to the US had been a ratings disaster.

In the light of this satisfactory fact, the Australian coverage on Channel 7 seemed not so bad: and indeed it wasn’t, if you accepted the requirement that any event with an Aussie in it
had to be covered, even at the cost of cutting away from something more thrilling. In this regard, a notable victim was Britain’s authentically heroic Steve Redgrave, whose victorious coxless
four was seen crossing the line, but whose appearance on the dais to receive his fifth gold medal in as many Olympiads was not featured. Having survived the ravages of time, he had succumbed to a
television producer with an itchy trigger finger. You would have thought he rated a short interview, if only for old time’s sake. After all, he wasn’t an American. Whatever happened to
Bundles for Britain?

Naoko Takahashi wasn’t American either, but there was no ignoring her. Not only did she win the women’s marathon with puff to spare, she was so cute that the cameras misted over as
they tracked her through the streets of a smitten city. Sydney had once been attacked by Japanese midget submarines but this was different. Though Naoko was tiny too, she was armed with nothing but
the unquenchable conviction that her
netsuke
dimensions were some kind of an advantage instead of a handicap. Cheer-squads of Japanese fans injured their lungs on the sidelines as she came
pattering up the last hill and on into the roaring stadium, where she circulated like a pet mouse which had been sent into the Colosseum to make up for a shortage of lions.

Next day’s Japanese newspapers were evidence of what Japan’s women have done for themselves and their country in the long years that the ashes have taken to cool after the war the
men started.
Yomiuri Shimbun
had her breaking the tape on the back page (i.e. the front page) while in the front of the paper (i.e. the back) there was a two-page spread full of nothing
but her. In a culture where even the empress must devote her efforts to ensuring that she does not appear taller than her husband, the new
marason
winner is part of a feminist breakthrough
that makes ours look like a walkover. In the light of that fact, the pictures were historic. Here she was in close-up, her teensy teeth taking a bite out of a medal the size of a
vermeille
mill wheel; and here she was again, hugging the runner-up. Snuggling up to the
gaijin
! It was a new world.

Nor, you can bet, will her endorsements be just for noodles. Look forward to the Sony Takahashi compact sound system, the Mitsubishi Marason miniature sports car, and any number of tie-ups with
Panasonic. In my hotel, the Panasonic executives were still arriving and leaving by the bus-load every day. Their top man, Matsushita-
san
himself, the venerable
daimyo
of Japanese
electronics, had already been and gone, bowed in and out by platoons of suits, but his fine nose for a market would already be on the case. Panasonic didn’t back the Olympics by accident.
When I stepped into an elevator full of people wearing Panasonic ponchos, they were discussing Takahashi-
san
in terms they usually reserve for Elle McPherson. Helping to sponsor the games
had been worth it to them anyway, but here was a bonus.

But if Takahashi-
san
meant a lot to Japan, Cathy Freeman meant everything to Australia. Right through the weekend, the television channels ran special Cathy programmes. As her big
Monday dawned cool and wet, the papers were special Cathy issues. It was universally assumed that Australia’s future as a mature nation would be secured by her victory. Few and brave they
were who dared to suggest that the possibility of her losing could not be ruled out, in view of the presence on the track of several other athletes all faster over 400m than the average
journalist.

For the beleaguered minority who had retained their sanity, there was solace to be gleaned by the information – only fleetingly mentioned in the media – that Cathy herself had not
read a newspaper in months. Her final would not happen until after eight in the evening. It was a long day’s journey into night. I spent half of the day at the diving pool, watching
incredible things, and the other half in one of the crowded downtown bars, watching even more incredible things – TV commentators pushing themselves to the edge of desperation as they cranked
up the tension with a gigantically clumsy verbal winch.

By this time the whole city had turned into a huge network of viewing parlours. One of the best was the foyer of the Qantas building, but you had to pretend to be a pilot to get in. Qantas staff
were in there with glasses of wine. Circular Quay, however, was still the prime spot. In about half a square mile of usually open space, there was absolutely nowhere to sit down unless you had
arrived before nightfall, but the giant screens had the whole story. Out at the track, Cathy peeled off her outer tracksuit to reveal an inner running suit, a sort of Green Hornet ensemble that
would be hard to explain away if she fizzled. ‘In many ways,’ bellowed a commentator, ‘her fate may be decided in the next few minutes.’ The same words were probably the
last that Mary Queen of Scots ever heard.

Her fate wasn’t decided, of course, although it might well have been had she lost. But she won, with that long, lovely stride that puts Puck’s girdle around the earth; and she will
now be able, from a position of strength, to get on with the difficult business of controlling her own life when everyone she meets wants a piece of it. Blessed with the uncommon gift of public
privacy, she will probably cope. Her post-race interview was perfect. ‘Something like this happening to a little girl like me!’ It was exactly the right thing to say, as a whole nation
congratulated itself on its faith, love and maturity.

But Reconciliation will be harder than that. As Cathy (not our Cathy: her Cathy) is all too aware, there are thousands of Aboriginals who can’t run, and now they have nowhere to hide
either. Mature, multicultural Australia’s one and only recalcitrant minority is likely to go on being buffeted by two contradictory paternalistic exhortations: ‘Stay as sweet as you
are’ and ‘See what you can do if you try?’ Both are patronizing, and it is a nice question which is the more mischievous.

Just as we were soothing our collectively inflamed liberal conscience with the prospect of Cathy taking her place among the international community of super-cool black athletes, Marion Jones
turned out to have a problem, in the shape of C. J. Hunter, her other half, or other eleven twelfths. The shape of C. J. Hunter takes a box of pencils and a large sheet of paper to describe.
Let’s just say that he is a shot-putter who looks as if he could put a London bus on the roof of your house. The news came through that he had withdrawn from the games not because of a torn
meniscus, as he claimed, but because of the presence in his body of about a thousand times the permitted level of an anabolic steroid. There was no reason, we were told, to suppose that Marion
Jones had known about this.

The assurances seemed reasonable. Crouching in her corner of the bedroom while C. J. Hunter fills the rest of it, she could hardly be expected to keep tabs on what every area of his body is up
to. But looking at Marion’s tearful smile, it was hard to quell awful memories of Flo-Jo in her final phase. Would there be no end to the drug thing? No, because there is no end to the big
money. It was almost enough to make you long for an end to the Olympics. But not quite: in Sydney, nothing could do that.

To prove that God is not mocked, for a day or two it rained on the Sydney Olympics, and there was a sense of divine retribution for too much profane enjoyment. Drugs were
threatening to spoil the party. Everyone agreed that it was the best party ever, but worshippers of the golden calf thought the same. Then Moses made them melt it down and drink it.

C. J. Hunter, the mountainous shot-putting husband of American star sprinter Marion Jones, called a press conference to explain how an infantry division’s lifetime supply of anabolic
steroids had got into him by accident. To help defend his innocence, he was attended by Johnny Cochran, the very mouthpiece who had shown us how the Los Angeles police framed O. J. Simpson, and who
would soon, presumably, show us how the International Olympic Committee had backed up a tanker of nandrolone to C. J.’s condo and transferred its contents to his sleeping form by intravenous
injection at dead of night.

As the stunned Australian press looked on, it became apparent that C. J. Hunter and Johnny Cochran were made for each other. C. J. burst into tears, Johnny railed against injustice, and the
combined effect was enough to persuade you that the Olympic movement was so far gone into pharmaceutical hell that there was nothing to do except pour concrete over the whole deal, surround it with
a barbed-wire fence, and put up signs warning children that if they played there they would have to be hunted down and shot.

As if things weren’t dismal enough, Romania’s teeny-bopper gymnast Andreea Raducan was stripped of her gold medal for swallowing a cough drop prescribed by her team physician, the
aptly named Dr Dill. This seemed unfair until her appeal to a higher authority was rejected with draconian hauteur. ‘The anti-doping code,’ droned a man with an all-purpose
international accent, ‘must be enforced without compromise.’ Andreea, it was explained, was so tiny that a single one of Dr Dill’s pills was enough to multiply her muscle-tone
like a Benzedrine inhaler up the nose of a performing flea.

‘I don’t make nothing wrong,’ wailed Andreea, touchingly missing the point. It not only sounded unfair, it
was
unfair, and in that fact lay salvation. Sydney would be
the games where the drug thing hit the wall, no matter what the cost. A few Bulgarian kayak paddlers who had tested positive might still be paddling their kayaks, but apparently there were
technical reasons for that. (Perhaps they had put on so much heft that they could not be removed from their kayaks without surgery.) On the whole, however, this was a story of the rules being the
rules. As Wittgenstein said just after he hit Bertrand Russell over the head with a billiard cue, a game consists of the rules by which it is played. No rules, no game. Drugs were out.

Sex, however, was still in, and it helped to save the day. In many minds an evil comparable with drugs, sex was everywhere in the Sydney Olympics, in the form of delectable bodies sketchily
attired. Not all of these were female, but the ones most likely to arouse ire mainly were. I myself had been guilty of looking upon the female beach volleyballers with more attention than their
diffident skills warranted. The Brazilians, especially, were too much, brushing the sand from their lightly tanned flanks as if aware that every grain of it was reluctant to leave. As they skipped,
bounced, dived and tumbled without ever adopting an ungainly pose, I thought I recognized one of them from the Oba Oba club in Rio, but it’s twenty years since I’ve been there. Perhaps
it was her mother into whose spangled G-string I tucked a ten-dollar bill after a samba routine that left every man in the room with his head in his hands, weeping softly for the evanescence of
human life.

In the Kuwaiti version of the Olympic television transmission, the female beach volleyballers did not appear at all. The Kuwaiti television authorities, after studying the videotape with care,
had decided that the dress code drove a coach and horses through the Koran. When the Kuwaiti female beach volleyballers take the field at the next Olympics, they will be wearing the full,
theologically approved kit. Nothing will be visible except their eyes. Concealment should be a great aid to tactics: try guessing where a Kuwaiti female beach volleyballer is going to hit it
next.

Meanwhile the heavily breathing Kuwaiti television authorities and I were on a certain loser. Female beach volleyball, although an abject failure on the mental level, was a raging success in
terms of base desire. The Australian team, not just because they won the gold medal but because they were so easy on the eye, had the crowds around Sydney’s giant TV screens yelling in
orgiastic self-congratulation. They made Sydney’s women feel beautiful.

Sydney’s women
are
beautiful. It can be fatal to say so, because feminist orthodoxy rules Australia the way Torquemada used to rule Toledo, but to dodge the facts you would have
to tape your eyes shut and walk with a white stick. The ethnic blender that has been humming away ever since World War II has produced varieties of comeliness to boggle the Australian male mind.
Unfortunately for the varieties, the Australian male mind has been slow to respond to this plenitude. It is said that the women of Saigon lost the Americans the Vietnam War, because their
loveliness made the grunts think twice about putting their lives on the line. The women of Sydney, had they been present at the time, would have sufficed to get the Hundred Years War restricted to
three weeks and the Thirty Years War called off altogether. Why do the men of Sydney not fall on them like satyrs?

There are several theories. One theory says that many of the more attractive men have eyes only for each other, and that the rest are subdued by political correctness. Whatever the reason, the
fact remains that the influx of international male visitors has brought Sydney’s females something they are not used to: appreciation. They are looked at in the street; softly whistled at;
engaged in conversation. They are not sure they like it. They are not sure they don’t. Away from the pool, an Australian male swimmer is not necessarily a model of sophistication. An Italian
male swimmer, on the other hand, could be a model for Armani. He wants to discuss the book you are reading. You forgive him for the way he touches your wrist while he admires the nail-polish that
none of the local boys have ever noticed. Perhaps the Olympics should always be held here.