The rules are clear. Each item of clothing has to be pegged at least once. Except pants. They can just be laid over the line. Pegs are regulation plastic, single spring. Clock starts when the washing machine door opens and stops when the last item is hanging motionless. Five-second penalty for a double-fold hang. Colours and whites are separate events — very few people can excel at both — and you’re disqualified if anything falls off the line less than a minute after the clock stops. Welcome to my Olympics. The event? Speed clothes-hanging. My PBs? 88 seconds for colours (so many socks) and a world-record 72 seconds for whites (disputed by the previous champions, Bulgaria, because there were two duvet covers in the load). If I really focus, if I devote myself entirely to improving the technique, I think I can go further. Experts claim the one-minute barrier will never be broken in our lifetimes. But if I can master the snatch-jerk-mouth-peg-and-release, it’s there for the taking at Paris 2024. I believe in me.
Researchers have worked out what we all knew already: countries that host the Olympic Games don’t become more sporty as a result. Remember Super Saturday and Spiffing Sunday nine years ago? Team GB winning gold in all sorts of weird and wonderful disciplines? Wasn’t it inspiring? Didn’t it just make you want to take up a new sport? Well, according to a professor in Sydney, no, it wasn’t and, no, it did not. We watched from our sofa with a bag of Doritos and then we did not go out and throw a javelin. We’ll be doing the same this week — absorbed entirely in sports we haven’t thought about for four, no, five years. We’ll be momentary experts in fencing (“Nice balestra!”), water polo (“Nice pump fake!”) and rhythmic gymnastics (easily a 9.4), then we’ll have a pizza and carry on with our unathletic lives.
The authors of the report, published in The Lancet, are calling for more planning around big sporting events such as the Olympics to “translate the enthusiasm into sustained public health programmes that are achievable and enjoyable for the general public”. Which sounds very sensible except it’s missing the key point: Olympians are obsessives and we all know it. The runners, jumpers and skippers are single-minded enough, but imagine distilling your entire life into something as specific as a shot put or a pommel horse or the 10-metre dive. Imagine doing a thing at such an intense level for such a long time that your whole body shapes itself into a tool to do that thing a bit better.
The physical commitment is astonishing. The mental investment is in another league. When someone analysed the expressions of medal winners at the Barcelona Games, they found, unsurprisingly, that the gold medallists had the biggest smiles. Next happiest were the bronze medallists, relieved they’d not come fourth. It was the silvers who spoilt the party. They looked gutted, all rictus grins, resentful eyes and if onlys. If only another centimetre. If only another millisecond. Four years’ training down the drain. Someone should have told them that winning is no bed of psychological roses either. Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, has described the depression he slumped into after each Olympic high. Where, after all, can you go from gold?
There has to be something between us on our sofas and the super-athletes on television this week. And that’s where my clothes line comes in. Inspired by the Olympics but fuelled by the drudgery of domestic chores, I have other disciplines. There’s the one-hand dishwasher unload, which is no more ridiculous than race-walking. There’s the dog triple jump — an exhausting combination of dog-walking and the triple jump, obviously. The window-cleaning event is judged on style rather than speed, but the washing-up is a straight sprint. I have arranged hurdles between the house and the shed/home office and when it’s Child C’s bedtime, he competes in the one-legged toothbrush, a fiendish specialist sport and not at all just a cunning way to get him to brush his teeth. On a similar note I have tried to get my Olympic committee to endorse the “not being on your phone” marathon, but they insist that’s clearly not a sport and besides, isn’t this all getting a bit silly? Well, yes, I say, as I set off for the shops behind a Japanese man on a moped. But it’s no sillier than the pole vault and look how tidy the house is.
