BBC is obsessed with Olympic emotions, but where were they when Imane Khelif’s battered opponent was sobbing in pain?
FASTEST recorded television link of the Olympic Games?
Clare Balding at the Aquatics Centre, who took 0.0013 seconds to say: “Back now to the swimming.”
Five words delivered with a strange mixture of blind terror and relief, not because she gave too much of a toss about the 200 metres butterfly that followed but because it was preceded by a brief report about Imane Khelif beating Italian Angela Carini into a tearful and distressing submission at the women’s boxing.
A subject Clare seemed strangely keen to avoid discussing.
She’s not alone, either.
Over the past week, I’ve seen the same “rabbit in the headlights” expression on the faces of BBC colleagues JJ Chalmers, Mark Chapman and Jeanette Kwakye as they’ve tried to take the conversation in any direction other than Imane and the tests showing the Algerian had male chromosomes.
Moral cowardice
What’s curious about Clare’s aversion is that she’s partly built her career on championing women’s sport, from the endless virtue-signals of her social media accounts to hosting worthy documentaries like When Football Banned Women.
That’s the easy bit, of course.
What’s hard is sticking your head above the parapet on an issue like Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting, who are either women wronged or, as I think, the most visible sign yet that we’re witnessing the destruc- tion of women’s sport by biological men.
No comment on this issue is unacceptable for a journalist.
Yet that seems to be the BBC’s position and it’s deeply ironic, because, as a man, it’s hard to watch their erratic, woke-leaning coverage without getting the distinct impression we’re tolerated rather than welcomed as equals.
This feeling applies just as much to the Beeb personnel, where they’ve vanished great pros like Garry Herbert, Phil Jones and Dan Walker and haven’t got any man anchoring prime-time broadcasts, as it does to the sport.
For, as anyone who saw them nearly miss what could’ve been Andy Murray’s last game, in favour of a women’s rugby group match, will surely confirm, there seems to be a pecking order to their Olympic broadcasts.
Bronze medal — men’s sport. Silver — women’s sport.
Gold — Any woman who’s had children.
So obsessed with that last category is the BBC that I started to think the full name of Britain’s most famous rower was “Mumofthree Helen Glover.”
If there’s one thing they’re more obsessed with, though, it’s crying.
Ideally, it’s tearful athletes they want, but if none oblige, pundits like Becky Adlington and Clare will start sobbing themselves.
There’s a tactic to prompt crestfallen athletes to cry as well.
They ask them to describe their “emotions”, rather than the race.
The absolute queen of this one being athletics’ Sarah Mulkerrins.
“Dina, what are your emotions?”
“Josh, I’m sure there are mixed emotions?”
“Daryl, there must be a whole range of emotions.”
There were indeed, and when they linked back to the studio Gabby Logan told Denise Lewis: “I see that’s made you emotional” and she cried: “Yes, I am emotional.”
The further irony of this forced emotion is that they’d have had all the sincere tears in the world if they’d been brave enough to dwell on Angela Carini, whose anguish provided the defining image of these Games.
But they didn’t, and since then they’ve tried to bury the whole story of Imane Khelif, to the extent the Algerian’s brutal semi-final victory was almost totally erased from Tuesday night’s coverage.
Lucky for the Beeb, then, they do still have two voices brave enough to voice an opinion.
One is boxer Nicola Adams, who’s described Khelif’s inclusion as “unfair and dangerous”, the other, inevitably, is Sharron Davies who’s the only BBC presenter who knows how it really feels to be cheated out of Olympic gold and has accused the IOC of “Legalising beating up females”.
In a just world, the heroism of Sharron Davies, who’s con-sistently defied vile threats to defend women’s sport, would be marked with a special presentation at December’s Sports Personality of the Year Awards.
Such is the moral cowardice of almost everyone else at the BBC, though, I’d be much less surprised if they gave the Overseas gong to Imane Khelif: “For raising the profile of women’s boxing.”
That’s a bit rich, Miriam
THERE are places where it’s OK to deliver an environmental lecture.
The baggage hall at Perth airport after you’ve just arrived long-haul from Britain isn’t one of them.
But that was never going to stop Miriam Margolyes walking up to the first bloke she saw, minding his own business, on her BBC Two Australian Adventure and saying: “Anyone in a high-vis vest is a miner, right?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like mines.”
He probably had a similar aversion to tactless eco-bats, but Instead of telling her to “F* off back to Hogwarts”, he politely replied: “Most of us don’t either, but it helps everyday people like us pay our bills and look after our families,” and left Miriam to stew in her own hypocrisy.
Sadly, this was not the start of any great learning curve, though.
Miriam simply set about the task of insulting every other Aussie who was unlucky enough to be sucked into her gravitational field and didn’t share her narrow world view.
It’s no surprise the BBC loves her doing this, of course, because, like them, she’s a posh, self-loathing socialist who loudly trumpets her love of the working-class until such time as they become rich, when she wants them to crawl straight back into their victim box.
It was a shock, however, that Miriam met someone even less enticing than herself.
A monstrous escort called Zoe who wraps men in clingfilm for a living and claims: “The reason people come to me is I’ve got a fat a**e.”
Miriam. Don’t even think about it.
Unexpected morons in bagging area
THE Chase: Celebrity Special, Bradley Walsh: “In the names of two musicals, what word follows A Little Night and The Sound Of?”
Maisie Summers-Newton: “Day.”
Bradley Walsh: “A spy who gives information to opposing sides is known as a double what?”
Bob Champion: “Rummy.”
Tipping Point, Ben Shephard: “Norwegian Forest is a breed of which domesticated feline animal?”
Inderjit: “Fox.”
The Chase, Bradley Walsh: “Waltzing Matilda is considered the unofficial national anthem of which country?”
Helen: “Germany.”
Moe to beat
THERE’LL be a full podium of Olympic Filth Corner winners next week, if I’m desperate enough.
But the man to beat is currently Moe Sbihi with this eye-opener at the rowing: “Those Italians love it. It’s their passion and Giuseppe in the third seat loves the pain and he loves the feel of that red zone.”
Random irritations
THE institutional pro-Labour bias of Good Morning Britain, where they’ve now reached the farcical stage of Ed Balls conducting friendly interviews with his own wife, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary.
ITV’s second series of Irvine Welsh’s desperate-to-shock Crime collapsing in boring woke cliches.
And multi-millionaire Australian Adventure traveloguer Miriam Margolyes seriously claiming “Perth is wealthy and expensive and I’m not used to such things”, even though she’s owned houses in LA, London, Tuscany and Australia and recently listed her favourite hotel as “The George V in Paris.”
The struggle is real, kids.
Great Olympic insights
MARK FOSTER: “We don’t want to talk about it being a slow pool. But it’s not a fast pool.”
Emily Craig: “Rowing is unbelievably simple and difficult.”
And Matthew Pinsent: “Three golds, two silvers and two bronze. A total of eight medals.”
Compiled by Graham Wray
TV gold
ALMOST everything that was worth watching, during this wretched TV week, was provided by the Olympics, where my personal highlights were the men’s thrilling 1500 metres final on Tuesday and the stunning theatre of Sweden’s Mondo Duplantis breaking the world pole vault record on Monday night.
The one exception to this rule was a single detail that leaked out of Channel 4’s otherwise forgettable documentary Titanic In Colour, provided by historian Guy Walters: “The Titanic did not have any deckchairs to re-arrange. It had wooden steamer chairs.”
Thick, lazy politicians, please note.
Shoe done it?
FOLLOWING two dead-end episodes, C4’s third instalment of The Body Detectives washed up a 30-year-old corpse with distinctive footwear, weighed down by metal shoe lasts and some leading questions from narrator Anna Maxwell Martin.
“Was ‘North Sea man’ a cobbler, or murdered by a cobbler? Amber Butchart needs to approach the small community of British cobblers to see if anyone remembers him.”
Some time later . . .
Amber: “We reached out to the cobbling community to see if anyone could give us any information about these links to the footwear trade. And so far . . . nothing.”
Cobblers.
Name is the game
IN terms of Olympic compound names, I’m extremely grateful to reader Rob Bull for pointing out the men’s three-metre synchronised diving final featured a “LONG/WANG”, though I gather the men’s pole vault did as well.
And it dislodged the bar.
It’s Joever
THIS Morning, following his stint on Love Island, Josie Gibson asks Joey Essex: “Is it true you’re quitting reality TV?”
No.
Reality TV is quitting him.
Lookalike of the week
THIS week’s winner is Donald Trump and Rygel X from Farscape.
Sent in by Karen Michele.