It’s been a week now, and it’s safe to say that London 2012 is a triumph: golds galore for Team GB, the Queen is a Bond girl (thanks, Danny Boyle!) and the whole country has been swept up in Olympic fever – I’ve never heard ‘God Save the Queen’ sung as loudly and lustily as when Jessica Ennis got her gold medal last night. But come on: this is Britain, so there’ll always be moaners, from the Tory twit who derided the spectacular opening ceremony as ‘multicultural crap’ to complaints about empty seats to Rebecca Adlington ‘only’ getting two bronzes (which, by the way, isn’t exactly the wooden spoon: bronze is still an incredible achievement).
Pshaw, I say to the cynics. They don’t know how good we’ve got it. So let’s look on the dark side and show them that it could be worse. At least none of these fictional sporting catastrophes has befallen London 2012 . . . yet.
No one’s been shot in the foot
Sports Day at Llannaba Castle, the shambolic public school in Evelyn Waugh’s satirical masterpiece Decline and Fall, is a model of organisational ineptitude. The ground isn’t marked out, the race distances are measured by eye and there’s no equipment, making it easy for the boys to cheat – not that it bothers headmaster Dr Fagan:
‘But he only ran five laps,’ said Lady Circumference.
‘The clearly he has won the five furlongs race, a very exacting length.’
‘But the other boys,’ said Lady Circumference, almost beside herself with rage, ‘have run six lengths.’
‘Then they,’ said the Doctor imperturbably, ‘are first, second, third, fourth and fifth respectively in the Three Miles.’
It’s irrelevant who wins because the whole event is only an excuse to lure the boys’ rich parents to the school for the afternoon. But there is one definite loser: a drunk Mr Prendergast uses a loaded service revolver to start the races, shooting little Lord Tangent in the foot in the process. The novel’s comedy is as black as poor Tangent’s foot, which eventually goes septic and has to be amputated. He dies.
The equipment hasn’t run away
Who can forget the Red Queen’s croquet match in Alice in Wonderland? It’s so beautifully bizarre it’s impossible for anyone but Lewis Carroll to describe it: ‘The balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingos, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches . . . The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing.’ Between the Queen yelling ‘Off with their heads!’ and the equipment with, literally, a mind of its own, it’s near impossible to score a point, let alone win. Alice spies opportunity when she sees two hedgehogs/balls preoccupied by fighting, but by the time she’s retrieved her flamingo from the other side of the garden, the hedgehogs have gone AWOL.
No one’s shrugged their shoulders and given up
Well, apart from the badminton cheats. But even if they were trying to lose, at least they were still playing the game, unlike Quentin Coldwater in Lev Grossman’s ‘grown-up Harry Potter’ novel The Magicians. Here, Hogwarts = Brakebills and Quidditch = Welters, and the novel playfully alludes to the parallels, with one Welters player remarking, ‘Hang on. Gotta get my Quidditch costume. I mean uniform. I mean Welters.’ Welters is kind of like live-action chess, with real magicians acting as the pieces and casting spells to capture squares, throwing the ‘globe’ to choose a square to attack. Usually when a sport is introduced in a book, especially one set at a school, the protagonist serendipitously turns out to have a knack for it, and The Magicians is no exception: ‘Quentin turned out to be unexpectedly talented . . .’ But The Magicians‘ similarity to Harry Potter is only skin-deep and subverts expectation at every turn. Far from becoming a sporting hero, Quentin’s Welters career is a complete anticlimax. Instead of pulling himself together to turn around a losing game at match point, he pettily throws the globe straight at an opponent, injuring him, then grabs his girlfriend and jumps into a pool, abandoning the game. To Quentin, to whom life – even life as a magician – is a crushing disappointment, a game doesn’t really matter. And when Brakebills enters an international tournament, the team returns home under a cloud, having lost every single one of their matches. Quentin’s downbeat attitude to Welters chimes with his dawning realisation that getting what you thought you wanted – magic – doesn’t make you happy. In The Magicians, it’s not just Welters but life that’s a losing game.
Nuclear armageddon hasn’t happened
Infinite Jest might be set at a tennis academy, but it’s the insanely complex nuclear-conflict strategy role-play game Eschaton that the students take deadly seriously. The rules that David Foster Wallace concocts for Eschaton are too labyrinthine and esoteric to summarise here – in fact, its hypothetical rule book would probably be as long as Infinite Jest itself – but the game involves tennis balls standing in for nuclear warheads, jockstraps for rocket launchers, old T-shirts for countries and tennis courts for world maps while the players are presidents, prime ministers, dictators. To get across just how gravely Eschaton is taken, let’s go back to the source. Take it away, DFW:
‘For these devotees become, on court, almost parodically adult – staid, sober, humane, and judicious twelve-year-old world leaders, trying their best not to let the awesome weight of their responsibilities – responsibilities to nation, globe, rationality, ideology, conscience and history, to both the living and the unborn – not to let the terrible agony they feel at the arrival of this day – this dark day the leaders’ve prayed would never come and have taken every conceivable measure rationally consistent with national strategic interest to avoid, to prevent – not to let the agonizing weight of responsibility compromise their resolve to do what they must to preserve their people’s way of life. So they play, logically, cautiously, so earnest and deliberate in the calculations they appear thoroughly and queerly adult, almost Talmudic, from a distance.’
So when Evan Ingersoll violates a fundamental (but unspoken) rule and launches a tennis-ball nuclear warhead at not an T-shirt/country but a real-life player (and suspiciously muscular and mustachioed rage-bomb Ann Kittenplan at that), the painstaking set up descends into anarchy. But Eschaton is so deadly serious that the chaos represents not a playful fracas between kids pelting one another with tennis balls – it’s full-scale nuclear armageddon.
Competitors haven’t started a revolution
OK. So you’re an evil dictatorship that keeps the population in check by having an annual competition where you let loose 24 children in an arena and watch them kill each other. Who thought it would be a good idea to have a special edition featuring 24 of the competition’s previous winners – people who thought they’d won and would never have to do anything like it ever again? But that’s the mistake the Capitol makes in Catching Fire, the second book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy. At the Quarter Quell, which marks another glorious 25 years of the Hunger Games, President Snow decrees that this year’s competitors will be chosen from the existing pool of winners. It’s intended as a ruse to get Katniss Everdeen back in the ring, who outwitted the system the previous year and needs to be punished. But by attacking all the other Hunger Games victors in the process, it should come as a surprise to no one when the screwed-over winners band together and bust out of the arena, fomenting the revolution that eventually takes down Snow and the Capitol. After all, history is written by the winners.
Aliens haven’t invaded
It’s Darts Night at the Flying Swan, the most important night of Brentford’s social calendar – in Robert Rankin’s The Brentford Triangle at least. But this is no ordinary darts match. Players include martial-arts grand master Tommy Lee, whose hand-carved ivory darts take two strong men to pull out of the board; Faustian Young Jack, whose spirit-guides launch his missiles to the treble twenty and the man Kelly, ‘more a fast bowler than a darts player’ . The tournament suffers myriad interferences, like exorcisms, incontinence, telekinesis and good old-fashioned cheating, but it’s when the final dart is interrupted by an alien invasion that the match finally comes to an end. Poor old Neville the Part-time Barman.
What’s that you say? Darts isn’t an Olympic sport? Well, not yet – but it should be in my humble opinion, and it could be if Prince Harry has his way. And if we’re being picky, neither are croquet, Welters, Eschaton or the Hunger Games. Could the campaigns start here . . . ?
So there we go: a few empty seats and the Russians’ eyesore uniforms aren’t that bad considering the disasters that could occur. Are there any I’ve missed?
The Inside Room 