MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
flAVING spent the last week in the country, I have had the opportunity to watch the Olympic Games upon the television screen. I have found it an entrancing experience. It is not, I confess, that I take any deep or continuous interest in the Games themselves. I should be pleased, of course, to win the Decathlon, to be acclaimed the greatest athlete in the world, and to be accorded a Pindaric return to California. I should have felt flattered had I been chosen, in the place of Mr. John Mark, to carry the sacred torch upon its last lap to Wembley and to enter the arena with my antelope stride amid the plaudits of eighty thousand spectators. But I do not pretend to care very much whether or no Miss Svinhufvud of Finland throws her javelin with greater speed, accuracy and force than does Miss Skold of Sweden. I admit indeed that my attitude towards the Olympic Games is somewhat negative. As one who has devoted much of his life to the cause of international conciliation, I regret that every few years or so much money and great powers of arrangement should be devoted to organising conflict ; and that many hundred young men and women should return to their homes under the belief that all umpires are corrupt and that all foreigners cheat. Much as I appreciate the symbolism of the sacred flame (kindled among the fallen marbles of Olympia by the blaze of the Morean sun and to the accompaniment of General Markos' snipers), I cannot but regret the amount of fiammiferi, allumettes and matches which must have gone to keep the sacred flame alight. Much as I should have wished, had I been a Trojan warrior, to be good at javelins, I fail to see any utilitarian purpose in such prowess at the dawn of the atomic age. Nor do I quite understand what permanent merit can be acquired by the
capacity to throw metal disks several yards away. • • * * We were always assured, when we were at school, that one of the most commendable aspects of Greek athleticism was that the reward of victory was an immaterial reward ; all that the victor obtained was a sprig of olive. That was an incorrect piece of information. An Olympian victor, as Cicero sneeringly remarked, received more rewards than a successful general. At Sparta he was accorded forever afterwards the post of honour in battle ; not a guerdon which I should have cherished myself. At Athens he got 500 drachmae in cash and free meals for life in the Town Hall. Their praises were sung by the greatest poets of their age ; Pindar, Euripides and Simonides vied to do them honour ; altars were erected to their memory ; and their statues were immortalised, at the very zenith of their physical perfection, by Praxiteles and Pheidias. Nothing like that occurs today ; there will be no statue of Miss Svinhufvud erected at Wembley ; Mr. John Mark will not, I fear, be fed for life by the Town Council of Cambridge. The Greeks, being sensitive and sensible people, were fully aware of the tragedy of the athlete's career. For a year or two, as Pindar noted, life was "as sweet to them as honey" and they "flew upon the wings of their manhood " ; yet thereafter they became but "a shadow in a dream" and all they could do was to train their children to follow after them and in their turn to win the olive crown. Being a less imaginative generation, we allow our athletes just to peter out into being old boys. A few photographs will be preserved in an album, but photographs have a mysterious way of getting out of date. I have in my possession a photograph of two French athletes, taken in z866. It has an old-fashioned look ; this is not due to the clothes they are wearing, since they are wearing no clothes, apart from two large leaves plucked from an adjoining vineyard. It is due to the inescapable fact that the photographs were taken in 1866. The Prodteles effect is lost.
• * * * I understand that my own country (Great Britain) has not dis- tinguished itself in these Olympic Games. I am assured that to many people this is a cause of wounded pride ; I have been told that the spectators who throng to the stadium at Wembley cannot conceal their sensitiveness upon this point, and applaud with undue
emphasis any slight victory that we happen to gain. It is announced upon the loud-speaker that Miss Alice Mildmay, of Worthing, has qualified for the semi-finals of the croquet competition for women over forty ; a tornado of applause sweeps across the stadium ; eighty thousand spectators shout themselves hoarse, as if they had just heard the result of the Battle of Alamein.. I confess that it seems curious to me that we, who for generations have enjoyed the pleasures and opportunities of compulsory games at school, should be so easily defeated by Brazilians and Cubans who, until but a few years ago, never took any exercise beyond a little gentle footing along the Avenida. All this (as I am assured by elderly ex-athletes who follow with wistful concentration these successive heats and contests) is due to the fact that we have been trained from boyhood not to think so much about winning, but to concentrate upon the game itself. They tell me that this is a noble attitude to adopt towards the Pentathlon. I do not pretend to be an expert on such subjects, but I confess that such an attitude seems to me not noble, but silly. If we desire to throw javelins, disks and weights to a greater distance than other people can throw them, then surely we should apply much industry to the task. It appears to me illogical to admire the amateur approach to these contests and at the same time to mind if one is defeated by professionals. I have no temptation at all to toss cabers, but if I did like tossing cabers, I should train myself to toss them fast and far. I should not revel in the lax approach to such contests and then feel humiliated if my approach were proved to be lax.
* * * * I have, I know, no right to express any opinion on such subjects, since the pleasure I have derived this week from watching the con- tests upon the screen was due less to an interest in the Olympic Games than to an interest in television. It seems incredible to me that I in Kent should become simultaneously aware that a Jamaican swimmer is at that very second handing his towel to his trainer, with a backward motion of the arm. I find it curious to watch the splash and dash of swimming-races and to hear that curious echo which is thrown up by water in an enclosed space. I do not blame the B.B.C. for not having so far discovered their own formula. I feel sorry for those who are obliged to go out to the Alexandra Palace and to expose themselves to the cameras and arc-lights which that operation entails. I feel even sorrier for the actors who are asked to perform in a play in which they are permitted no Lebensraum at all, but have to huddle together in the small space allotted to them like swallows upon a telegraph wire. But my deepest sympathy goes out to the announcers, male and female, who have to exude charm. There comes for them an acutely embarrassing moment when they have finished their announcement and have to pause for a few seconds before the cameras and the arc-lights turn elsewhere. It is fairly easy for the women, since the exudation of charm is part of their natural function. But for a man to stand in front of a camera, being viewed by distant thousands and just look nice, is an ordeal which should arouse the sympathy and the esteem of all right-minded people. I know what it means. I have done it once myself. Powdered and farded, I have stood in front of that camera feeling more like a zany than I had ever felt before.
* * * * I venture to suggest to the B.B.C. that they should (at least for the male announcers in their television programme) abandon the human touch. It should not be difficult for them to have masks constructed on the analogy of the Attic Theatre which the male announcers could wear. There could be the mask of comedy, the mask of narration, the mask for obituary notices and the mask for reading the weather report. While the announcers change from one mask to another, the lights could be extinguished and slow music could be played. It is not style which the Alexandra Palace lacks: it is stylisation. We could then watch the women of Scandinavia and Latin America battling in the swimming bath together, without those gusts of shame which the wretched announcers inflict.
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