Rewriting Russian Gymnastics

I saw the poster on the wall of the gym and it surprised my teacher when I asked if I could go.  She had noticed that I didn't exactly love PE ... But I loved gymnastics and I wanted to see my favourite, Olga Korbut.  My friends Elaine Richardson, Janet Brooks and Mary Andronowski wanted to come too. We set out in the school coach, all of us excited.  I wore my best purple dress and purple eye shadow and had my little Kodak camera in my bag.  I remember the excitement when we arrived and parked up at Wembley, only a few steps away from the Trident studio where rock band Queen had recorded some of their first album!  I half expected to see them there :-). We found our seats, up in the higher echelons of the Grand Tier.  There was a strong smell of popcorn.  Scampering school children made the boards beneath our feet echo, seats around us snapped up and down, lending the impression of an ever moving sea rather than an attentive audience.  But ...

I just watched the most discouraging competition of my life in WAG, the AA.  Maybe the team competition yesterday was better - I didn't watch - but the AA left me dead cold.  The highlight was an energetic floor routine from Jordan Chiles.  The rest was complete and utter baloney.  The standard of vault has improved, but elsewhere there were falls aplenty (in fact the only gymnast to go four for four was Ellie Seitz, who finished second).  Beam routines lacked any fluidity and were almost all staccato, stuttering shambles.  The standard of tumbling on floor was fairly good, but choreographically the routines were empty.  Where did split leaps go?  When did bouncing on the spot take their place?  When did shuffling while pathetically waving wrists about or wiggling hips and shoulders semi-suggestively qualify as connections?  When did it become OK to fudge half hearted leaps into the corner of the floor mat, as if no one would notice? In ...

There is so much talk of sport in the media recently, in a negative way, that I wanted to express my thoughts. The three themes that regularly emerge are corruption, cheating and cruelty, or a combination of all three.  Sports politics, at various levels local, regional, national and international, are an overarching consideration, as are gender and racial issues.  Most sports are funded by national and local governments on one level or another.  Corporate organisations sponsor sports.  Sporting federations wrangle for power.  Coaches fight for prominence.  Sports relationship to medicine, injury and recovery is currently emphasised as never before.  The battle has become as much one of the doctors as of the athletes.  Perhaps the purest part of sport is the action that goes on in the competitive arena. The sociological context of sport differs from person to person, country to country and sport to sport.  The framework o...