The next Anita Lonsbrough

I don’t think I have really got excited about the Olympics since 1960 which left me with the ambition to be the next Anita Lonsbrough. This dream disappeared – rapidly - when I realised this would mean devoting a large part of at least the next 4 years of my life to going out early in the morning to plough, boringly, up & down in chlorinated water, which made my ears ache.

The Tokyo Games, when they came, left me largely indifferent. Any vestigial interest in Olympic sports disappeared in 1972 in Munich when the universal obsession with tiny Olga Korbut seemed to me disturbingly unhealthy.

My enthusiasm for such international events was partly restored by the Commonwealth Games in Mnachester which did a lot of good, not least in helping the city, withdrawn & depressed by economic decline, to start looking outwards again & showed an old style coming together, away from the elite part of the competition.

I thought I was merely indifferent to the London Olympics – bemused by the hysteria which greeted the announcement in Singapore. But the sheer bloatedness of the event, the draconian nature of the restrictions on free movement, the crackdown on any Sid’s café which might wish to join in the spirit of the thing by offering an Olympic breakfast, & the scary nature of ‘security’ & the difficulty of finding anything non-Olympian on the radio makes me wish I had left the country for the duration.


Links
Anita Lonsbrough

Olga Korbut
BBC: 1972 Olympics