Even as We Speak (56 page)

Square men of Sydney will undoubtedly retaliate by upping the ante of their amatory commitment. The air is charged with pheromones as never before, and even in daytime the giant screens of
downtown work like the walls of an enormous discotheque, pumping out images of physical allure. In Stadium Australia, while Cathy Freeman’s elegant legs were in the very act of propelling her
to glory, Australia’s star female pole-vaulter was hauling herself skyward to a silver medal. An exalted blonde goddess whose ten-foot pole looks like the one she wouldn’t touch you
with, she bears the nowadays typical Australian name of Tatiana Grigorieva.

Tatiana and her husband (equally gorgeous, and also an Olympic pole-vaulter) have made a new life here, far from the tragic confusions of their background. Your heart would be melted by
Tatiana’s early struggles if her beauty had not already broken it. Tatiana, or Tattie as she is fated to be called, has already posed naked for an upmarket glossy. For purposes of research I
tried to buy a copy, but was told that it had sold out instantly, mainly to men my age who spoke out of the side of their mouths. I would hate to believe that the pictures were any more arousing
than the effect she generates when she launches herself upside down towards the bar that topples at a touch.

In the slow-motion television image of her silver-winning jump, which days later is still being played over and over, she stays up there for an age, sidling over the bar and seeming to whisper
to it on the way, as if promising to give it a kiss if it behaves. Would I were that bar, thinks many a poor swain, that she might misjudge her jump and fall with me in her embrace, e’en into
yon soft bag. From young men with tinnies in their hands, a concerted, lyrical groan goes up. Australian masculinity is on its way back. In so many ways these games have expanded the national
consciousness – or perhaps they have just given it an opportunity to express itself.

Australia has been promised by Tatiana’s management team that she will become a catwalk model. Fashion industry experts say that not many pole-vaulters have made the transition to catwalk
model, but it can’t be as hard as making the transition from catwalk model to pole-vaulter. Naomi Campbell is built along the right lines. She might care to give it a try. She could keep the
judges waiting until they go to sleep, and then just walk under the bar and lie down.

Beauty becomes more beautiful when it does something, and also more bearable; in line with the principle that sex, when sublimated into aesthetics, is purged of longing. The thought crossed my
mind when Marion Jones crossed the finishing line to win her second gold medal, for the 200m sprint. Shedding tears for C. J. Hunter, she looked as if he had just sat on her, but in full flight she
was a glorious thing to see. She is a big girl – sprinters of either sex are nearly always big – but has the air of having been scaled up from something smaller while retaining its fine
proportions, in the same way that the Boeing 747 reminds you of the F-86 Sabre.

Like everyone in Sydney I have become a one-man kangaroo court on the matter of drug-enhanced sporting performance, because when
all
the competitors are suspect you have to make up your
mind somehow or stop watching. I go by appearances. On Thursday night, after four days of deliberation, I finally found Marion not guilty. She was just too feminine. In certain aspects, notably in
the area of the gluteus maximus, she tends towards the chunky, but not in the way that Flo-Jo did in her second phase, when she had biceps on her jawline like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Since Flo-Jo was never busted except by an early death, you will note that I find her guilty by the same method that I find Marion innocent, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and I draw
the line where women start turning into men. If that’s their object, it’s their business; but as a side-effect of ambition it seems unfortunate, and to force them into it is surely a
crime. By that criterion, the news that a whole generation of East German women athletes and swimmers had been doped to the eyeballs was the least surprising news ever published. Now that doping is
associated with the big money attendant on success, it should not be forgotten that it started in the East, as a weapon in the battle for national prestige. Actually the big money was operating
there, too. If the athletes refused to roll their sleeves up for the needle they were thrown off the team and back into everyday life, where there was no access to the special stores that spelt the
difference between a life worth living and mere existence. The welfare of their families was on the block. It was hard to say no. But the men who made them say yes were criminals, and it is hard to
accept that some of those men are walking free while an itsy-bitsy sprite like Andreea Raducan weeps for the medal she lost for a cough-drop.

In the middle of the week the sun had fought the rain, but on Friday it was no contest. The same bright sky that lit the beginning of the games was back to light its three-day climax, which
would culminate in a closing ceremony tipped to be the most exciting thing the world had seen since the opening ceremony. The crowds that had retreated to the bars and cafés now filled the
streets again, and once again the pixilated children out of a Max Reinhardt production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
were everywhere, their green and gold heads popping out from
windows, from behind trees, from above the rails of ferries. It seemed a silly time to be indoors, but that was where the diving was, and of all the aesthetic pleasures of the games there was
nothing to touch the diving.

A lot of it hit the giant screens, because Australia did well for once in the only department of aquatic sport where success has traditionally proved elusive. One of our female synchro divers
was the very girl whose name had caught my attention ten days before: Loudy Torky. It turned out that she had been born in Palestine. Once again Australia had profited from upheaval elsewhere in
the world. Palestine had Yasser Arafat, and we had Loudy Torky. It could have gone the other way. Yasser Arafat could easily be imagined as an Australian diver, doing his famous two and a half
forward somersaults with triple hand grenades. But such considerations shrank to insignificance beside the achievements of China’s great female diver Fu Mingxia. At the age of twenty-two she
was in her third Olympics, and dominating the scene with imperial assurance.

Fu Mingxia is the woman that Madame Mao would have liked to have been, but Madame Mao had no talent. China is still a monster, and there can be no doubt that the thirty-seven athletes who were
withdrawn before the games were doped in the first place as a matter of policy. But China has come on, and the clearest proof is that Fu Mingxia can practise her art unhindered. Madame Mao would
have killed her. The commissar mentality hates talent with a passion, and Fu Mingxia has so much talent that it hurts.

Apart from her dignity, she is nothing special in repose, but in motion it is a different matter: sex, having risen to the aesthetic, takes off into the realm of the spirit. From the qualifying
rounds all the way through to the final, every tower dive she did was like a falling ballet solo, as if Altynai Asylmuratova had thrown herself out of a window for doomed love. Coming down from ten
metres with your knickers in a twist, if you hit the water with your hands even a tiny bit apart you might as well have run head first into the side of a house. The moment of impact is called the
entry. With Fu Mingxia, the entry made the sound of ripped silk. She was adorable, and it was strange to think that she will never endorse anything, and that her gold medals will be the only
valuable objects she will ever own. Unless, of course, China, like Australia, becomes a mature nation.

As the games of the XXVIIth Olympiad ran out of events, the Olympic Village joined the party that had been raging all over Sydney since the torch arrived. Athletes with nothing
left to do were whooping it up into the wee hours: a blast for them, but bad news for the marathon runners whose upcoming ordeal would be the prelude to the much-anticipated closing ceremony. Sole
competitor in the first marathon in history, Pheidippides had been obliged to run the distance without benefit of sponsorship from a shoe manufacturer, but at least he got some kip the night
before.

Press speculation was rife about how impresario Ric Birch could stage a finale that would top his overture, the opening ceremony that had stunned the world and given Australia confidence in its
new position as a mature nation. Some of the other mature nations had already brought their teams home. When their empty chalets were entered to be cleaned, all too many of them turned out to be
littered with syringes. Where the Bulgarians had been, the cleaners had to back out and wait for the army: there were needles in there like the floor of a pine forest after a tornado.

But the drug thing, like the bad weather, was by now a back number. Think-piece journalists raided the thesaurus to describe the sky: azure, cerulean, Arcadian, Poussinesque. This, surely, was
Eden, and minus the serpent. The Germans and the Israelis remembered Munich, but if any terrorists were going to raise their balaclava-clad heads in Sydney, it was getting late. Either they
hadn’t come or they had gone native – dumped the AK-47s and gone into business selling Semtex to the female discus throwers, who put it on their muesli.

When you considered that the Australian press, during the runup to the Olympics, greeted their advent as if an invasion force of Martian troop-transports had entered the earth’s
atmosphere, the papers had done pretty well. Their praise for Australia’s champions might have bordered on the hagiographic, but the athletes of other nations got frequent mentions, and the
photo spreads looked as if the United Nations had been reconstituted as a beauty contest. On television, Australia’s Channel 7 at least did better than America’s NBC, which was faced
with the awful knowledge that it had paid more than a billion dollars for a ratings clunker, and would have done better putting its money into
Battlefield Earth
.

Channel 7 had no problems with the time difference or the receptivity of its audience. Apart from its gift for the ill-chosen word, its only but insoluble problem was with the events, which if
they are to be covered fairly on screen must interrupt each other continually, thus guaranteeing that any given viewer, umpteen times a day, will be hauled away from something interesting to
something soporific. By the final weekend the traffic in visual narcotics had thinned out, but there was still enough yawn-material available to ensure that anything gripping could be cut away from
at the crucial moment.

Thrilling bike races through the crowded streets were interrupted by the thousandth transmission of the same commercial for Australian Mutual Provident, an organization which is apparently
dedicated to arranging for its subscribers a visit from their future selves, who will assure them that they were right to dream of that little house on the hill, because the time would come when
they would magically be able to buy it, owing to the inspired assistance of Australian Mutual Provident. Watching transfixed, as a man will when he meets a funnelweb spider on his way to the
wood-pile, on several occasions I was visited by my own future self, who assured me that the time would come when the migraine induced by too many screenings of a transcendentally dumb commercial
would melt away, after I had entered the headquarters of Australian Mutual Provident, tied up its executive in charge of advertising, and burned the place down.

‘The right to dream’ was a media buzz phrase throughout the Olympics, hanging around like a blowfly at the barbie. Reserving to myself the right to dream of kicking the set in, I
took solace in the thought of the imminent return to the bike race, but instead the screen was filled with a man in a top hat riding a horse walking sideways, or six canoes with twelve men in them
crossing the middle distance at a not very surprising rate. Channel 7 had a cable TV subsidiary, but on that one you were likely to be confronted with a couple of small boxers in headgear the size
of sofas hanging on to each other as if they had finally realized that a slow foxtrot felt better than getting hit.

Boxing has no place in the Olympics, not because it damages the brain – if you want to see a damaged brain, take a look at a Taiwanese judo competitor who thought he had devoted his life
to an intricate Oriental art form until a 400lb Norwegian fell on him – but because you can get it better elsewhere. The same applies to tennis and football. I would have said that the same
applied to basketball, in which America’s dream team – a bunch of subluminary pros playing an exhibition tournament for charity – had been declared invincible. But by behaving as
if their supremacy were beyond challenge, they made themselves so obnoxious that when the Lithuanians almost beat them the whole of Sydney went mad with joy around the giant TV screens.

In the whole of the games I saw no event more riveting. In the velodrome there had been an event called the Madison in which about a dozen teams tangled in a flat-out dogfight while the
spectators, including myself, struggled for breath to yell with. When the British team crashed I had to prise somebody’s hands from my throat but found it easier after I realized they were
mine. I had also developed an unexpected passion for Australia’s women’s hockey team, the Hockeyroos. Men’s hockey still strikes me as something a dweeb does to get out of playing
rugby, but women’s hockey is a different matter, or anyway it is when the Hockeyroos play it. They also attain a surprising level of pulchritude for women who could take your head off with a
stick.

On top of all that, as the linkmen say, there had been the last rounds of the men’s platform diving. Every man in the final could do the inward three and a half that Greg Louganis had
astonished the world with only two Olympiads ago. With everyone diving to the same stratospheric standard, the medals were decided by the pointing of the toe, the shape of the haircut, the flaring
of the nostrils. You have to see a dive like that go wrong before you can grasp what’s involved. Not all that long ago a diver got killed doing the inward three and a half. I watched the
whole final as if Damocles beneath the sword were dancing like Fred Astaire. But not even that could touch the excitement of seeing Lithuania come within ten seconds of stuffing it to the dream
team.