Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  And now, just as suddenly, there were the black athletes, and they were all from somewhere else. Except for Cathy Freeman, we didn’t have any of our own who could get near them. The Americans were in the vanguard of the invasion, and this time there was no blinking the fact. Blinking was all we had time to do as Marion Jones zipped through her 100m qualifying heat dressed in a full-length sweatsuit. It was clear that she could have done the same in a cocktail frock and high heels, although she did us the honour of partly disrobing when she ran for the medal. Winning over the same distance, Maurice Greene wore gold-soled shoes, and it was obvious that if the shoes had been solid gold with a hat to match he would still have finished first. With their souvenir value of a hundred thousand dollars each, it was generous of Greene to throw one of the shoes into the crowd, and prudent of him to retain the other: he could limp all the way to the bank. The red-haired boy from Wagga Wagga who caught the shoe will be lucky to make as much in his life as Greene makes in a month. And these were the repressed people of America.

  Could our Cathy, representing the repressed people of Australia, keep up with this display of muscle? Ever since World War II, Australia, haunted by the spectacle of American abundance, has had to console itself with the thought that its own abundance is more justly distributed, yielding a better life. But then these super-cool black Yanks turn up in their designer shades and investment footwear, flanked by their agents, accountants, chiropractors and manicurists. They tour town in rented Ferraris. They make our television interviewers sound inarticulate. It was good to hear that NBC’s transmission of the Olympics to the US had been a ratings disaster.

  In the light of this satisfactory fact, the Australian coverage on Channel 7 seemed not so bad: and indeed it wasn’t, if you accepted the requirement that any event with an Aussie in it had to be covered, even at the cost of cutting away from something more thrilling. In this regard, a notable victim was Britain’s authentically heroic Steve Redgrave, whose victorious coxless four was seen crossing the line, but whose appearance on the dais to receive his fifth gold medal in as many Olympiads was not featured. Having survived the ravages of time, he had succumbed to a television producer with an itchy trigger finger. You would have thought he rated a short interview, if only for old time’s sake. After all, he wasn’t an American. Whatever happened to Bundles for Britain?

  Naoko Takahashi wasn’t American either, but there was no ignoring her. Not only did she win the women’s marathon with puff to spare, she was so cute that the cameras misted over as they tracked her through the streets of a smitten city. Sydney had once been attacked by Japanese midget submarines but this was different. Though Naoko was tiny too, she was armed with nothing but the unquenchable conviction that her netsuke dimensions were some kind of an advantage instead of a handicap. Cheer-squads of Japanese fans injured their lungs on the sidelines as she came pattering up the last hill and on into the roaring stadium, where she circulated like a pet mouse which had been sent into the Colosseum to make up for a shortage of lions.

  Next day’s Japanese newspapers were evidence of what Japan’s women have done for themselves and their country in the long years that the ashes have taken to cool after the war the men started. Yomiuri Shimbun had her breaking the tape on the back page (i.e. the front page) while in the front of the paper (i.e. the back) there was a two-page spread full of nothing but her. In a culture where even the empress must devote her efforts to ensuring that she does not appear taller than her husband, the new marason winner is part of a feminist breakthrough that makes ours look like a walkover. In the light of that fact, the pictures were historic. Here she was in close-up, her teensy teeth taking a bite out of a medal the size of a vermeille mill wheel; and here she was again, hugging the runner-up. Snuggling up to the gaijin! It was a new world.

  Nor, you can bet, will her endorsements be just for noodles. Look forward to the Sony Takahashi compact sound system, the Mitsubishi Marason miniature sports car, and any number of tie-ups with Panasonic. In my hotel, the Panasonic executives were still arriving and leaving by the bus-load every day. Their top man, Matsushita-san himself, the venerable daimyo of Japanese electronics, had already been and gone, bowed in and out by platoons of suits, but his fine nose for a market would already be on the case. Panasonic didn’t back the Olympics by accident. When I stepped into an elevator full of people wearing Panasonic ponchos, they were discussing Takahashi-san in terms they usually reserve for Elle McPherson. Helping to sponsor the games had been worth it to them anyway, but here was a bonus.

  But if Takahashi-san meant a lot to Japan, Cathy Freeman meant everything to Australia. Right through the weekend, the television channels ran special Cathy programmes. As her big Monday dawned cool and wet, the papers were special Cathy issues. It was universally assumed that Australia’s future as a mature nation would be secured by her victory. Few and brave they were who dared to suggest that the possibility of her losing could not be ruled out, in view of the presence on the track of several other athletes all faster over 400m than the average journalist.

  For the beleaguered minority who had retained their sanity, there was solace to be gleaned by the information – only fleetingly mentioned in the media – that Cathy herself had not read a newspaper in months. Her final would not happen until after eight in the evening. It was a long day’s journey into night. I spent half of the day at the diving pool, watching incredible things, and the other half in one of the crowded downtown bars, watching even more incredible things – TV commentators pushing themselves to the edge of desperation as they cranked up the tension with a gigantically clumsy verbal winch.

  By this time the whole city had turned into a huge network of viewing parlours. One of the best was the foyer of the Qantas building, but you had to pretend to be a pilot to get in. Qantas staff were in there with glasses of wine. Circular Quay, however, was still the prime spot. In about half a square mile of usually open space, there was absolutely nowhere to sit down unless you had arrived before nightfall, but the giant screens had the whole story. Out at the track, Cathy peeled off her outer tracksuit to reveal an inner running suit, a sort of Green Hornet ensemble that would be hard to explain away if she fizzled. ‘In many ways,’ bellowed a commentator, ‘her fate may be decided in the next few minutes.’ The same words were probably the last that Mary Queen of Scots ever heard.

  Her fate wasn’t decided, of course, although it might well have been had she lost. But she won, with that long, lovely stride that puts Puck’s girdle around the earth; and she will now be able, from a position of strength, to get on with the difficult business of controlling her own life when everyone she meets wants a piece of it. Blessed with the uncommon gift of public privacy, she will probably cope. Her post-race interview was perfect. ‘Something like this happening to a little girl like me!’ It was exactly the right thing to say, as a whole nation congratulated itself on its faith, love and maturity.

  But Reconciliation will be harder than that. As Cathy (not our Cathy: her Cathy) is all too aware, there are thousands of Aboriginals who can’t run, and now they have nowhere to hide either. Mature, multicultural Australia’s one and only recalcitrant minority is likely to go on being buffeted by two contradictory paternalistic exhortations: ‘Stay as sweet as you are’ and ‘See what you can do if you try?’ Both are patronizing, and it is a nice question which is the more mischievous.

  Just as we were soothing our collectively inflamed liberal conscience with the prospect of Cathy taking her place among the international community of super-cool black athletes, Marion Jones turned out to have a problem, in the shape of C. J. Hunter, her other half, or other eleven twelfths. The shape of C. J. Hunter takes a box of pencils and a large sheet of paper to describe. Let’s just say that he is a shot-putter who looks as if he could put a London bus on the roof of your house. The news came through that he had withdrawn from the games not because of a torn meniscus, as he claimed, but because of the presence in his body of about a thousand times the p
ermitted level of an anabolic steroid. There was no reason, we were told, to suppose that Marion Jones had known about this.

  The assurances seemed reasonable. Crouching in her corner of the bedroom while C. J. Hunter fills the rest of it, she could hardly be expected to keep tabs on what every area of his body is up to. But looking at Marion’s tearful smile, it was hard to quell awful memories of Flo-Jo in her final phase. Would there be no end to the drug thing? No, because there is no end to the big money. It was almost enough to make you long for an end to the Olympics. But not quite: in Sydney, nothing could do that.

  5. OLYMPIC CRESCENDO

  To prove that God is not mocked, for a day or two it rained on the Sydney Olympics, and there was a sense of divine retribution for too much profane enjoyment. Drugs were threatening to spoil the party. Everyone agreed that it was the best party ever, but worshippers of the golden calf thought the same. Then Moses made them melt it down and drink it.

  C. J. Hunter, the mountainous shot-putting husband of American star sprinter Marion Jones, called a press conference to explain how an infantry division’s lifetime supply of anabolic steroids had got into him by accident. To help defend his innocence, he was attended by Johnny Cochran, the very mouthpiece who had shown us how the Los Angeles police framed O. J. Simpson, and who would soon, presumably, show us how the International Olympic Committee had backed up a tanker of nandrolone to C. J.’s condo and transferred its contents to his sleeping form by intravenous injection at dead of night.

  As the stunned Australian press looked on, it became apparent that C. J. Hunter and Johnny Cochran were made for each other. C. J. burst into tears, Johnny railed against injustice, and the combined effect was enough to persuade you that the Olympic movement was so far gone into pharmaceutical hell that there was nothing to do except pour concrete over the whole deal, surround it with a barbed-wire fence, and put up signs warning children that if they played there they would have to be hunted down and shot.

  As if things weren’t dismal enough, Romania’s teeny-bopper gymnast Andreea Raducan was stripped of her gold medal for swallowing a cough drop prescribed by her team physician, the aptly named Dr Dill. This seemed unfair until her appeal to a higher authority was rejected with draconian hauteur. ‘The anti-doping code,’ droned a man with an all-purpose international accent, ‘must be enforced without compromise.’ Andreea, it was explained, was so tiny that a single one of Dr Dill’s pills was enough to multiply her muscle-tone like a Benzedrine inhaler up the nose of a performing flea.

  ‘I don’t make nothing wrong,’ wailed Andreea, touchingly missing the point. It not only sounded unfair, it was unfair, and in that fact lay salvation. Sydney would be the games where the drug thing hit the wall, no matter what the cost. A few Bulgarian kayak paddlers who had tested positive might still be paddling their kayaks, but apparently there were technical reasons for that. (Perhaps they had put on so much heft that they could not be removed from their kayaks without surgery.) On the whole, however, this was a story of the rules being the rules. As Wittgenstein said just after he hit Bertrand Russell over the head with a billiard cue, a game consists of the rules by which it is played. No rules, no game. Drugs were out.

  Sex, however, was still in, and it helped to save the day. In many minds an evil comparable with drugs, sex was everywhere in the Sydney Olympics, in the form of delectable bodies sketchily attired. Not all of these were female, but the ones most likely to arouse ire mainly were. I myself had been guilty of looking upon the female beach volleyballers with more attention than their diffident skills warranted. The Brazilians, especially, were too much, brushing the sand from their lightly tanned flanks as if aware that every grain of it was reluctant to leave. As they skipped, bounced, dived and tumbled without ever adopting an ungainly pose, I thought I recognized one of them from the Oba Oba club in Rio, but it’s twenty years since I’ve been there. Perhaps it was her mother into whose spangled G-string I tucked a ten-dollar bill after a samba routine that left every man in the room with his head in his hands, weeping softly for the evanescence of human life.

  In the Kuwaiti version of the Olympic television transmission, the female beach volleyballers did not appear at all. The Kuwaiti television authorities, after studying the videotape with care, had decided that the dress code drove a coach and horses through the Koran. When the Kuwaiti female beach volleyballers take the field at the next Olympics, they will be wearing the full, theologically approved kit. Nothing will be visible except their eyes. Concealment should be a great aid to tactics: try guessing where a Kuwaiti female beach volleyballer is going to hit it next.

  Meanwhile the heavily breathing Kuwaiti television authorities and I were on a certain loser. Female beach volleyball, although an abject failure on the mental level, was a raging success in terms of base desire. The Australian team, not just because they won the gold medal but because they were so easy on the eye, had the crowds around Sydney’s giant TV screens yelling in orgiastic self-congratulation. They made Sydney’s women feel beautiful.

  Sydney’s women are beautiful. It can be fatal to say so, because feminist orthodoxy rules Australia the way Torquemada used to rule Toledo, but to dodge the facts you would have to tape your eyes shut and walk with a white stick. The ethnic blender that has been humming away ever since World War II has produced varieties of comeliness to boggle the Australian male mind. Unfortunately for the varieties, the Australian male mind has been slow to respond to this plenitude. It is said that the women of Saigon lost the Americans the Vietnam War, because their loveliness made the grunts think twice about putting their lives on the line. The women of Sydney, had they been present at the time, would have sufficed to get the Hundred Years War restricted to three weeks and the Thirty Years War called off altogether. Why do the men of Sydney not fall on them like satyrs?

  There are several theories. One theory says that many of the more attractive men have eyes only for each other, and that the rest are subdued by political correctness. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that the influx of international male visitors has brought Sydney’s females something they are not used to: appreciation. They are looked at in the street; softly whistled at; engaged in conversation. They are not sure they like it. They are not sure they don’t. Away from the pool, an Australian male swimmer is not necessarily a model of sophistication. An Italian male swimmer, on the other hand, could be a model for Armani. He wants to discuss the book you are reading. You forgive him for the way he touches your wrist while he admires the nail-polish that none of the local boys have ever noticed. Perhaps the Olympics should always be held here.

  Square men of Sydney will undoubtedly retaliate by upping the ante of their amatory commitment. The air is charged with pheromones as never before, and even in daytime the giant screens of downtown work like the walls of an enormous discotheque, pumping out images of physical allure. In Stadium Australia, while Cathy Freeman’s elegant legs were in the very act of propelling her to glory, Australia’s star female pole-vaulter was hauling herself skyward to a silver medal. An exalted blonde goddess whose ten-foot pole looks like the one she wouldn’t touch you with, she bears the nowadays typical Australian name of Tatiana Grigorieva.

  Tatiana and her husband (equally gorgeous, and also an Olympic pole-vaulter) have made a new life here, far from the tragic confusions of their background. Your heart would be melted by Tatiana’s early struggles if her beauty had not already broken it. Tatiana, or Tattie as she is fated to be called, has already posed naked for an upmarket glossy. For purposes of research I tried to buy a copy, but was told that it had sold out instantly, mainly to men my age who spoke out of the side of their mouths. I would hate to believe that the pictures were any more arousing than the effect she generates when she launches herself upside down towards the bar that topples at a touch.

  In the slow-motion television image of her silver-winning jump, which days later is still being played over and over, she stays up there for an age, sidling over the bar and
seeming to whisper to it on the way, as if promising to give it a kiss if it behaves. Would I were that bar, thinks many a poor swain, that she might misjudge her jump and fall with me in her embrace, e’en into yon soft bag. From young men with tinnies in their hands, a concerted, lyrical groan goes up. Australian masculinity is on its way back. In so many ways these games have expanded the national consciousness – or perhaps they have just given it an opportunity to express itself.

  Australia has been promised by Tatiana’s management team that she will become a catwalk model. Fashion industry experts say that not many pole-vaulters have made the transition to catwalk model, but it can’t be as hard as making the transition from catwalk model to pole-vaulter. Naomi Campbell is built along the right lines. She might care to give it a try. She could keep the judges waiting until they go to sleep, and then just walk under the bar and lie down.

  Beauty becomes more beautiful when it does something, and also more bearable; in line with the principle that sex, when sublimated into aesthetics, is purged of longing. The thought crossed my mind when Marion Jones crossed the finishing line to win her second gold medal, for the 200m sprint. Shedding tears for C. J. Hunter, she looked as if he had just sat on her, but in full flight she was a glorious thing to see. She is a big girl – sprinters of either sex are nearly always big – but has the air of having been scaled up from something smaller while retaining its fine proportions, in the same way that the Boeing 747 reminds you of the F-86 Sabre.