Streams of unconsciousness from swimmers

by Paul Myers

Article published on the 2008-08-11 Latest update 2008-08-11 14:58 TU

Adlington (R) and Jackson after the final
(Photo: Reuters)

 Just when I thought that it might have been a bit harsh to set up a “squirmometer’’, confirmation has come that it is very much needed. Maybe it has something to do with all that water going into their heads, but the swimmers are providing streams of ... unconsciousness.

The 41-year-old American Dara Torres gave us “Age is only a number,” and “the water doesn’t know how old you are when you hit it”.

Then the British swimmer Rebecca Adlington came up with a swift combination of phrases one of which I believed had been consigned to the list of no-nos.

When I saw that the 19-year-old was from Mansfield, in the English county of Nottinghamshire, my mind went back to my time on the Nottingham Evening Post in the mid-1980s.

Her very presence at the Olympics must have been a big story at my old place of employment. The fact that she’s won gold will be bugled, I’m sure, across the front of the paper. And rightly so, for, to rework the stock phrase of the English footballer turned TV pundit Mick Channon, the girl done well.

But then she came up well short. Asked how she felt about being the first British woman since 1960 to win gold in the pool, Adlington said: “It’s absolutely amazing. It hasn’t sunk in yet. I’m over the moon.”

In the 1970s this was a flourish that we in Britain used to hear virtually every Saturday night on the BBC's Match of the Day. And it made the progression from the mouths of footballers into the vernacular to suggest transcendant elation. The set expression to epitomise rank injustice or abject misery became “sick as a parrot”.

Some inventive players tried to introduce some flair into the post-match analysis game with “mad as a dog” and some even advanced “chuffed” to describe the joy of victory. But while that sort of eloquence was welcome, it never made the journey into the public mind.

A couple of years ago, the Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard - dubbed one of the more articulate of his generation because he passed some exams at school - used the word “gutted” after a narrow loss.

I thought I detected a wry smile on his mouth but maybe that was the bitter taste of defeat. Perhaps Lampard, who is deemed to be media-savvy, was using it with a dash of post-modern irony.

Don’t think it’s the case for young Adlington. Her press conference responses suggested that she just isn’t used to the attention. Not even interviews with the Nottingham Evening Post will have prepared her for what she is going to be experiencing from now on. She’s a gold medallist in her first Olympic Games at the age of 19.

The pressure will probably be on her to defend her title before the home crowd in Britain in four years time. It’s all set up for a brilliant story on that angle. But my abiding memory will be of her and compatriot Jo Jackson - who got a bronze - just smiling and hugging each other for a good minute in the pool like two kids. It was natural and sincere.

They’d got a result.