Lady Gaga, John Lennon, Olympians and Ecclesiastes
Reflections on the start of the 2024 Paris Olympics
“Pandemonium” section of London 2012 cerenomy (Wikipedia Commons)
Recently I found myself watching the opening of the Olympic Games. As a teenager I had been drawn to it as a competitive swimmer (more about that later), but since then I had lost interest until I found myself watching the opening of London 2012. So, on the evening of Friday 26 July I watched the opening of the Paris 2024 Olympics. And I discovered that I was moved by the flotilla of boats carrying athletes from all corners of the world making their way down the River Seine through Paris in the pouring rain. Certain countries, which shall remain nameless, were notable by their absence. But interestingly, I found the historic tableaux of themes depicted by and on the river were partially reminiscent of Danny Boyles’ London’s 2012. I suppose this is not surprising, the cities are less than 300 miles apart and the two have a common European history. There was a thematic development throughout the opening ceremony starting with enchanté, a greeting of welcome, and then moving onward through synchronicité, and then three words from the moto of the French Revolution, liberté, equalité, fraternité, and then further development through sororité, sportivité, festivité, obsquerité, solidarité, solemnité, and eternité.
However, I was as surprised as anyone to see Lady Gaga performing, pre-recorded apparently, at the opening of the Paris Games and wondering what her connection was to France. I will only point out that American Independence took place in July 1776 and then some 13 years later in 1789 was the French Revolition. The athletes taking part all culminated their watery journey near La Tour de Eiffel the designer of which, Gustave Eiffel, also designed the framework for the Statue of Liberty, which was a gift from the Republic of France to the United States of America. So perhaps Lady Gaga’s performance expressing an empathy for the French was more than skin deep. But I had another surprise in the themed section entitled Obsquité, Darkness, on hearing John Lennon’s song Imagine. Imagine seemed to me an equally unlikely choice even if sung by the French singer-songwriter Juliette Armanet, especially as in London 2012 John Lennon himself played Imagine via a remastered video and accompanied by a Liverpool based choir.
The Statue of Liberty (1886) and La Tour de Eiffel (1889) both of which relied on an iron frame designed by Gustave Eiffel
(Wikipedia Creative Commons)
But let’s dig a little deeper and unpack this more thoroughly going beyond Anglo – French rivalries. Each Olympics has a song or anthem associated with it which must be officially adopted and ratified by the International Olympic Committee. Now, Wikipedia makes the comment that, “Some songs and anthems are more popular and famous than official songs and anthems.” I would suggest that Imagine, which contains the lyrics, “Imagine there's no countries | It isn't hard to do | Nothing to kill or die for | And no religion, too”, epitomises the spirit of the Olympics and that is why it featured in both 2012 and 2024 Games. So, why does NCB News say it could “unofficially be” regarded as an Olympic song or anthem. According to NBC it was sung twice previously before London 2012, once by Stevie Wonder in the 1996 Games in Atlanta, and again by Peter Gabriel in the 2006 Games in Turin.
Now, anyone who has seen my last blog The Boy Scouts, Atheism and AI will know that this is not the first time I have referred to John Lennon’s song Imagine. Indeed, in this blog I discuss Richard Dawkins’ support of the Atheist Bus Campaign which uses the slogan, “There’s probably no God.” Indeed, in the preface to his book The God Delusion he too makes reference to Lennon’s song Imagine and the implication is quite clear, he ascribes a long list of atrocities perpetrated by people in the name of God and connects these human atrocities to religion. Therefore, Q.E.D., the best way to reduce atrocities is to remove, or at least reduce, the influence of religion à la John Lennon. However, if you undertake a slight thought experiment and imagine Lennon’s song being brought in front of the International Olympic Committee I don’t think it’s difficult to see why it might get rejected.
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I started this blog saying that as a teenager I had been a competitive swimmer, and indeed represented Rochdale Swimming Club between 1968, the year I joined, to when I retired from competing in 1973. This was a period when my name appeared fairly regularly in The Rochdale Observer for representing Rochdale at swim meetings all over the Northwest. I would train regularly with the likes of Clive Rushton, David Martin, Carol Smith, Andrew Cullum, Raymond Powers and Christine Gaskell, several of which went on to represent Britain internationally. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, I am drawn to the Olympics and will be watching out for Adam Peaty defending his previous Olympic Gold medel. But why swimming? What had motivated me to join a swimming club? The reason I think is interesting and worth relaying because it says something about the value of sport.
Rochdale Town Hall and Rochdale Swimming Club swim cap (Wikipedia Commons)
At school I had been academically a failure, my parents naturally had great ambitions for me, and they enrolled me to attend Bury Grammer School founded in 1570. I was later to find out that only two sorts of boys mattered as far as the school as an institution was concerned, and those boys got their names on one of two boards that hung outside the headmaster’s office, one read Oxford and the other Cambridge. My father had been based in India during the Second World and had become very disillusioned with the British establishment, as he put it, he’d gone to India with, “Two Union Jacks shining in each eye” but six years later they had been extinguished. He’d been in the Royal Corps of Signals as a radio operator, and I don’t know the details, but some papers had gone missing and he’d been Court-martialed and been demoted to private, which is the rank where he started. He saw his own education as one of producing either cannon fodder or factory fodder, and that was not going to happen to his son.
So, I was enrolled and attended Bury Grammer School’s kindergarten, but that meant, at the age of eleven, I had to sit an entrance exam into the main school. Indeed, I sat The Eleven Plus twice in the end, and failed on both attempts! My self-esteem was sourly hit. It is noteworthy that although I had gone through all the preparatory classes to sit these examinations, in a class of about 30 boys, in all the tests there were a couple of us holding up the rest. One abiding memory I have was that each week we would have a spelling test of twenty words, and if you got less than 18 on two consecutive occasions you would be given the cane. This was standard practice, and it was not long before I got labelled as lazy and/or stupid. My father had taught me to swim on a Sunday morning at the Rochdale swimming baths and as the Bury Grammer School had a pool I was, with Laurie Smith (latter to become a GB International yachtsman) and fellow classmate, among the best swimmers in the class. So, having failed my Eleven Plus exams and been sent to the local secondary modern school (Matthew Moss), my mother suggested my swimming prowess might help to restore my self-esteem. I joined Rochdale Swimming Club.
Bobby McGregor (Tokyo 1964; Mexico 1968) and Martyn Woodroffe (Mexico 1968) had been my swimming role models and I had followed their swimming careers assiduously. While at Matthew Moss I would train during the lunch breaks at Castleton Baths, a few minutes’ walk away, and then go down to the pool in Rochdale in the evenings. Around 1972 this was beginning to get serious, and I was traveling around from one swim meeting to another having been nicknamed locally as Might Mouse. Clive Rushton was being trained by his father and had just returned from the Olympics in Munich, I remember his father coming to my home to have a discussion with my parents and I about training for the Olympics, I had just won the under sixteen Boys 110 yards Butterfly at the Northern Counties and it was the next step up. But as my nickname implies, I was small less than five feet six while many of those I was competing against were approaching six feet. I was therefore having to make up a good foot on every dive and turn. At a club level this presented no problem I was after all Mighty, but at an international level would that have still been the case? Another problem was that I was increasingly being beaten, it’s fine when you are winning, the training all seems worth it, but these larger boys had also started training in the morning, before the pool was open to the public, that meant early morning starts! The upshot of all this was that I decided my swimming career was over and I would concentrate on my school exams. Swimming had restored some of my self-esteem and by the time I was twelve I had learned to read, so academically, although I was far from top of the class, I could just about hold my own, especially in geometrical mathematics which I loved. I can still remember to this day being taught the Pythagoras’s theorem by Mr Humphrys, the maths teacher at Matthew Moss High School. I can still visualise his tweed jacket and the weather outside the classroom, it was a spring day, the sun was shining and the leaves on the trees had that spring vibrancy.
2024 Olympics Paris (Wikipedia Commons)
Returning to this year’s Olympiad, and although I have never competed at that level, as a competent club swimmer with, at one time, aspirations to perhaps be an Olympian, I have experienced the training, the pre-event tension, even vomiting following events, and the extraordinary disciple that it all requires. I am in total admiration, whatever the sport! Yet, I am not sorry that I retired from swimming, temperamentally, and as perhaps this blog attests, I am more a jack of all trades and master of none. A dilettante if your like. But, yesterday, I watched the woman’s 3 m springboard synchronised diving and with all the other spectators, I lived the emotional drama of the Australian pair of woman Maddison Keeney and Anabella Smith. They were destined for at least a bronze medal. But sport, like life can be brutal, and leading into the final dive Australia’s Anabella Smith overcorrects a slight imbalance and her right foot only partially connects to the board, and she is sent totally off kilter. The result the British pair, Yasmin Harper and Mew Jenson, take the bronze. I am drawn to Ecclesiastes (9.11):
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ah… Philosophy! Adversities sweet milk! I don’t think much more can be said.
