It’s almost a year before the Olympics are over and while it’s great that they’re coming to London and all that jazz, I’m sick of bloody sportspeople.
Yes, well done for getting up at 5am for 15 years and ‘focusing’ and ‘going forwards’, but so much time on the track or in the pool does render one a little dense. The way they talk, it’s as if they think they’re the voice of God when they sound like a wound-up doll that can only warble a few sentences, staring gimlet-eyed; terrifying.
And that Tom f*cking Daley. If I have to turn over a newspaper page and see his horrible teenage body and features again, I’m the one who will be diving into the void. He’s a kid who falls over for a living, why should he assail me permanently with his permatanned presence? There’s something quite, quite wrong about it.
It’s as if he’s our only Olympic athlete. I saw him on TV this week in the most pathetic performance that can ever be seen in an ad. Walking towards the camera picking up golf clubs and hitting balls, I don’t know what. What fun that must have been for the producer and crew. “What have I come to? I thought I was going to make a difference. My glittering future is now way behind me.”
Oh, and Rebecca Adlington, the moon-faced swimmer who must have tumbled from her mother’s womb saying I’m no oil painting, I’m no oil painting. Naturally, I’m hardly an Old Master either, any beauty I may have had died when I saw my first grey pubic hair, but do I burden the ‘nation’ with my dreams of being on Dancing With Stars and STAYING famous? No.
If Twitter ever did anything on this earth, it was allowing athletes to scriven their deepest, er I mean immediate, thoughts. It’s fantastic. They always f*ck up. Golfer Rory McIlory, surely the elder step-brother of Tom Daley, did it yesterday and he joins a long list of jokers in a Twitter fool’s gallery.
It also appears that Team UK (Team UK?! That sounds like a club that used to be in Wandsworth) wants to ban athletes tweeting at the Olympics. NO, NO, NO! They have to be able to tweet because that’s the only time they’re believable.
And it is with great delight that I have some breaking news. The previous paragraphs were written on a train to Birmingham and I’m completing this missive on a train to Bromsgrove. Interregnum I have been on an escalator where the fat bloke behind me fell backwards breaking the leg of the ticket inspector behind him.
Now, I don’t have that much against ticket inspectors, or against athletes, but the sound of him squealing as officials put up an awning around him rather like those on racecourses when horses are about to be put down, should have made me feel pity.
But I didn’t, it made me laugh and I am a very, very bad man. If I was an athlete I would be a finer man, I would have discipline, I would be a winner. But as it is I’m on a train looking at the Bournville Cadbury’s factory writing away. Much more fun than winning medals.
Monty Munford has more than 15 years' experience in mobile, digital media, web and journalism. He is the founder of Mob76, a company that helps tech companies raise money and exit. He speaks regularly at global media events with a focus on Africa, writes a weekly column for The Telegraph, is a regular contributor to The Economist, Wired, Mashable and speaks regularly on the BBC World Service.
