Just before the medal ceremony, and just after having his photograph taken with Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, the winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon was stripped of his title. It turned out that he had hitched a lift for 11 miles.
The crown was hastily passed to Thomas Hicks, an American. He had won despite declaring that he was going to give up at 17 miles — and had finally made it across the line only after his coach gave him a dose of rat poison to perk him up.
He was lucky, and not just because his support car carried strychnine. One of his fellow competitors had to run a mile extra after being chased by wild dogs. Another had scrumped rotten apples en route. If he had not then had indigestion followed by a nap, things might have been very different.
There are two standard beliefs people have about the Olympics. Half the world considers it a fantastic festival of human achievement, an inspirational celebration of the global pursuit of excellence. The other half considers it a phenomenal waste of money.
Both are wrong. The first group are wrong because I can’t see why anyone would be inspired to be really good at a sport by people who spend their entire lives trying to be really good at a sport.
This week, two British men proved themselves to be the third best in the world at jumping off a platform and spinning round and round before landing in water. They were utterly extraordinary. Was I inspired? No.
Seeing a display of diving perfection from professional divers is not going to inspire me to dive, any more than seeing a mathematician solve Fermat’s Last Theorem will inspire me to do a sudoku. Or, for that matter, any more than seeing Tom Daley showering himself down afterwards will inspire me to wear children’s Speedos and wax my bottom. The problem is, for an achievement to be inspirational it also has to be attainable.
Every time a city bids for the Olympics, it claims that it will inspire people to do more sport. And, when the Olympic flame is extinguished for another four years, what happens to that claim? Like an overgrown stadium after the crowds have left, it is forgotten.
That does not mean though, as the second group claim, that the Olympics is fated to be a massive waste of money. With only a few modifications they could return to the true Olympic spirit — to a time when, as in the 1948 Olympics, a housewife who practised high jump over her washing line could set a dozen world records or, as happened 44 years earlier, a race could be decided by the quality of stolen fruit.
Do we really want to inspire more people to do sport? Certainly. We are all too fat and lazy. But then what we need is not a celebration of excellence, but mediocrity.
With 13 individual golds, Michael Phelps is the greatest Olympian since Leonidas of Rhodes. He also has a torso hugely out of proportion to his body, and muscles that barely produce lactic acid. If you are taller than 7ft and aged 20-40 in the US, you have a one in six chance of being a professional basketball player.
These people’s achievements mean no more to me than the achievement of Gorbachev in having an interesting birthmark or of Pippa Middleton having a nice backside.
Consider cycling. The BBC led on Thursday night with news from the velodrome, where three men went round and round a banked circle faster than other groups of three men. I would be far more likely to cycle regularly if I could see them — without any training — make their way around London’s South Circular Road on a drizzly day, without getting tooted by a car or sworn at by a pedestrian.
These Olympians are not people like us but they used to be people like us — back in a time when the games were amateur in every way. In 1900 in the shooting event clay pigeons were substituted by a far less predictable projectile: real pigeons. At the same Olympics, swimmers had to go on an obstacle course in the Seine, clambering over boats and climbing poles. That makes for a memorable competition.
What will we remember from this Olympics? A pool going green, and some identically toned people being infinitesimally better than each other.
So this is what I propose to improve things. First we would have the conventional Olympics. People who feel a strong need to watch, say, tiny women jump on things and then cry because their left leg twitched slightly on the double axle pirouette dismount can do so.
Then the Paralympics. Superhumans of a different kind can spend a fortnight making able-bodied people feel depressed, as they see themselves outclassed even by athletes without a full set of limbs. Finally, there would be the Human Olympics — or, if we must have a portmanteau, the Hulympics. Like a big global sports day, it would consist of whoever could be found roaming the streets of the host city and had an afternoon to spare.
It would be amazing television. Would the 4x400 be won by the Irish drinkers who emerged from the Shamrock and Horseshoe, or the Polish sailors borrowed from the Rio docks? Will the cleaner who was a bit bored in the Ethiopian embassy have the courage to down her mop for the afternoon and jump off the ten-metre board, or will she lose out to the member of the Slovakian trade delegation who thought she was going to Brazil to talk about fridges?
Then, if they do jump off, what excuse would I have for sitting on my sofa just watching TV? If Paddy Murphy, eight pints of Guinness down, makes it around the track with only a brief fag break, how could I not afterwards start running into work?
And if none of that is persuasive enough for the IOC to make the necessary changes, at the very, very, least they could bring back live pigeon shooting.
Tom Whipple.