COMMENT
Sport as a surrogate for war has become something of a cliche.
It's hard to know exactly when the notion took hold. Presumably not on Christmas Eve 1914 when British, French and German troops declared a temporary truce and had a game of soccer.
To them sport and war were polar opposites.
The impromptu soccer match was their metaphor for normality and perhaps the brotherhood that might be possible if we could ever set aside nationalism, intolerance, ideology and our fatal propensity for falling under the sway of madmen.
Maybe it was 1932-33. The Australian captain Bill Woodfull summed up bodyline thus: "There are two sides out there; one is trying to play cricket, the other is not."
What wasn't cricket were the English bowlers targeting unprotected torsos and heads. It might not have been war but it certainly wasn't sport as the men who played soccer on Flanders Field understood it.
The wheel turns. In 1974-75 there was English blood on the pitch and the Australian crowds chanted, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if Lillee doesn't get you, Thommo must". They didn't mean "get" as in get out, as in dismiss.
These days "warrior" is one of sport's highest accolades. And when the All Blacks lose and get roughed up in the process, there's always a jowly retiree quick to remind them that test rugby is warfare.
It seems safe to assume that people who make this analogy don't have first-hand experience of a war zone or even access to a TV set. They certainly don't have much of an imagination.
On the other hand, for 40 years the Olympic Games were a front in the Cold War: Team Democratic Capitalism v Team Totalitarian Socialism and may the superior system prevail.
More often than not, when the medals were tallied up, that was the red team's system.
They could barely feed their own people, they sent poets to the gulag, they couldn't build a supersonic airliner that stayed in the air and they couldn't make the trains run on time but, boy, could they churn out Olympic medallists.
Because it was war and things weren't going too well on other fronts, the reds were prepared to go to any lengths to gain that winning edge.
As one lithe, well-proportioned blond after another emerged from East German training camps, suspicions mounted that maybe not all the doctors who worked on the Nazis' master race project ended up in South America after all.
And what of the Press sisters, Tamara and Irina, who won five gold medals for the USSR in Rome in 1960 and Tokyo four years later? Tammy, a shot and discus exponent, could have given Sonny Liston a run for his money, while Irina, who did the 80m hurdles and the pentathlon, looked like Popeye in a wig.
After dominating their events for almost a decade, the Press gang abruptly withdrew from competition before the 1966 European championships and was never sighted again. It was said they had to look after their sick mother but sceptics pointed to the fact that sex testing was being introduced.
Did KGB doctors shoot them up with male hormones or were they, in fact, men all along? I'd like to think that somewhere in the Ukraine a couple of burly old campaigners are watching the Games, polishing their medals and thanking their lucky stars they no longer have to shave five times a day.
Well, there'll be drug cheating and conceivably gender-bending at Athens and terror of terrorism will persist until the closing ceremony comes to a merciful conclusion and the athletes exit the stage in a conga-line. But without the East v West backdrop, where will the drama lie - in Michael Phelps' quest to break Mark Spitz' record of seven gold medals at a single Olympiad perhaps?
Let's hope not. An anomaly of the Olympics, and one that undermines the principle that a gold medal is a constant, is the fact that certain sports - notably gymnastics and swimming - are structured to enable their participants to achieve medal hauls that are physically and logistically impossible for athletes in other disciplines.
In 1992 Vitaly Scherbo, a gymnast from Belarus, won more gold medals in a single day than our greatest-ever Olympian, the middle-distance runner Peter Snell, managed at two Olympic Games. To win eight events in track and field, you'd have to be beyond freakish; you'd have to be in two places at once.
No wonder the Reds took gymnastics so seriously.
COMMENT
Sport as a surrogate for war has become something of a cliche.
It's hard to know exactly when the notion took hold. Presumably not on Christmas Eve 1914 when British, French and German troops declared a temporary truce and had a game of soccer.
To them sport and war were polar opposites.
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