THERE is talk of celebrating the return of British athletes from Athens with an open-top bus ride through the streets of London. The idea would be to hand people a chance to express their appreciation for the athletes’ efforts, within the controlled context of an official, government-endorsed homecoming. And simultaneously the opportunity would be there for shoppers on Oxford Street to wave at Bradley Wiggins — not, after all, a village in Yorkshire but a triple Olympic medal-winning cyclist, the first of those that Britain has had since the age of the horse-drawn carriage.
Questions necessarily abound at this stage about the likely form of the tour. Is Paula Radcliffe, for example, to be allowed on the bus, or should she be required to run along behind it as a form of penance? Should everyone carry something connected with their sport, so that we know who they are? A racket for the badminton players, say; a pair of goggles for the swimmers; and whatever it is that the archers were using, for the archers. (What were those things? They looked like a collision between a pair of straight-line skates, a harpoon gun and a satellite dish. Little John, who did his best work in the sport’s legendary sapling era, wouldn’t even recognise archery these days.) I don’t know what the synchronised divers ought to carry, but if they could at least stand together throughout the trip, it would help.
Still more importantly, is it to be medal-winners only? Or would that be too elitist and out of touch with the team ethos? After all, a mutual support network inspires much medal-winning effort, even within ostensibly solo disciplines. Should it be all aboard the bus, then, for everyone in and connected with Team GB? That would seem to be the fairest solution, although it’s bound to present problems for the equestrian team, as anyone who has ever tried to force a horse up the stairwell of a double-decker will gladly attest.
But these are organisational matters that can be handled in due time. The key thing to observe right now is how different present attitudes are from four years ago, postSydney, when, if Sir Steve Redgrave and Britain’s startlingly successful Olympics team wanted to greet the public from a bus, they had to catch it themselves. The Sydney medal-winners did get a Downing Street reception, but back in those days everyone seemed to be getting one of those, even Mick Hucknall. Hell, even the England football team got a Downing Street reception after the World Cup in South Korea and Japan!
Also back then, Redgrave was able to arrive at Heathrow without having to surf a rolling maul of gold-boggled admirers. In fact, he just drifted through the hall with his family. One recalls that there was some umbrage about this, when it was reported. Redgrave had just become Britain’s most successful Olympian, yet there was no red carpet waiting at Heathrow, no crowds and no member of the Royal Family. The word is not even the manager of the landside branch of Tie Rack had bothered to come out specially. Did nobody care?
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I’m not sure it was such an insult and I’m not sure that Redgrave will have been too bothered, either. You’ve just flown long-haul, 23 hours from Sydney after four years of bewilderingly lung-busting preparation have culminated in one final, Herculean effort: probably the last thing you want to do is make polite conversation with the Duke of York. With the manager of the landside branch of Tie Rack, maybe. But not with Prince Andrew.
True, when Raymond van Barneveld, the Dutch darts player and former postman, returned to the Netherlands after clinching the Embassy world title at Frimley Green a few years back, he was met at Schiphol airport by scenes of hysteria and mayhem such as used to greet Michael Jackson in happier times. But that’s darts: it moves people in different ways from rowing. Or in the Netherlands it does.
Anyway, Redgrave is living proof of the following theorem — an important one for Britain’s athletes to bear in mind, as they ready themselves for landing. Namely, it has never been satisfactorily demonstrated that a sportsperson’s standing within the community, in any important or lasting sense, is commensurate with the number of people prepared to greet him off a plane in the immediate aftermath of his triumph. Personally, I ‘ve never met anyone off a plane who wasn’t a member of my family. And sometimes I’ve even asked them if they wouldn’t mind getting a taxi.
That a bus-top tour is already a topic for discussion attests to two things. Firstly, it indicates the enduring legacy of England’s World Cupwinning rugby squad, whose experience suggested that, if the circumstances are right, people will take to the streets to see big men in suits in a bus.
The bus-top tour thus leaps above the Downing Street reception to become the bare minimum one can offer triumphant, home-coming sportspeople without appearing to insult them. (Before football’s European Championship finals, players, including Michael Owen, spoke of the bus-top tour that would await them if they won. It appeared to be a factor in their motivation, though, sadly, in the end, an insufficient one.)
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Secondly, the discussion attests to the way that, with London now bidding for an Olympics, the Government is prepared to leap on home-coming athletes with a zeal that it wouldn’t have considered four years ago when it might have made more sense, from the point of view of what was achieved. (At the time of writing, in athletics, which is the serious business of the Games as far as most people are concerned, Britain lags behind Lithuania and Belarus in the medals table.)
Still, a bus-top tour is a bus-top tour and they are always fun. Let’s only hope the next one isn’t completely hijacked by the London 2012 bid and its various vested interests and can still look like a natural outpouring of emotion from people prepared to squeeze into thoroughfares just to get a sniff of the Olympic magic emanating from a passing bus. (I’m not referring to the horses here.)
GILES SMITH RETURNS ON MONDAY