Whenever the England team fail to win the World Cup, or another Wimbledon passes without a British victory, the very prowess of the nation is called into question. The explanations for perennial failure are trotted out: the organisational structure is defunct, the politics of sport is a shambles, competitive sport has been expelled from school, we do not fund sport adequately, it rains too much in Britain and we all hide indoors playing computer games and going soft.
It would be better to start from the opposite assumption. Rather than anguish at defeat, the more appropriate emotion is wonder at occasional victory because, underlying the annual exodus of British players from Wimbledon, there is an exercise in hard arithmetic. There are too few of us trying to do too much at once.
There are 27 million males in Britain, of whom 5.6 million are below the age of 16 and 14.8 million are above the age of 35. Britain therefore has just shy of seven million men who in the right age bracket for a life as a top-class professional sportsman. The great diversity of human interests — the tendency of some men to read books or play in orchestras — rules out a good proportion of that seven million. Of the millions left who love sport in all its guises, too many, alas, have everything that they need except talent. The set of young men who might conceivably be candidates for a career in sport is already vanishing.
Then think of how we deploy this small cohort. Britain is the only nation that purports to be world-class at football, rugby union, rugby league, cricket, tennis and athletics. Germany’s cricket team is poor and Spain’s is no better. India have only ever qualified for the football World Cup once and then they failed to turn up. New Zealand has a great rugby team but its football team’s best World Cup showing was last year when they did not lose a game. Unfortunately, they did not win one either and went home after the first round.
Then, having spread ourselves so thinly, we have the eccentricity to play more minor sports than anyone else. Part of the reason for our excellent long-term record in the Olympics is that we can shoot arrows and make horses trot better than most. While the rest of the world is concentrating on football, Britain has a good record in dressage. Which raises another acute problem. No other nation has the sociological split in its sport that Britain does. Tennis is notoriously bourgeois and rugby is split into two codes by social class. Middle-class people watch football but they do not play it. In each sport we offer up a fraction of the British class system.
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Confronted with the might of the competition, that is a meagre response. China has 234 million boys and girls under the age of 14 today and it is obvious that, after the Beijing Olympics and the rise of Li Na, sport is becoming a diplomatic weapon. The Americans have 63 million boys and girls and Russia has 20 million, twice as many as Britain. Demographically, we are similar to Germany but Mesut Özil did not have to do one term of football and one term of rugby.
For all these reasons, it is not a failure but a victory against the odds for a young Scotsman to be the fourth-best tennis player in the world and play in three consecutive semi-finals at Wimbledon. And if and when it all goes wrong, at least we can look forward to the Olympic small-bore shooting next year. The Australians are hopeless.