Abstract
The big workroom at the main press centre in the London 2012 Olympic Park was known as the John Rodda Room. Alongside it was the Steve Parry Bar. This was uniquely satisfying for me because, alone among the accredited journalists, I was lucky enough to have had them both as much-loved colleagues.
Steve, long-serving sports editor of Reuters, gave me my chance in Fleet Street. John, ace athletics and boxing reporter, was a wonderful chef de mission of Team Guardian at my first two Olympics: the best-informed and wisest journalist at the Games. Both have gone now. They rose high in the counsels of the Olympic movement, hence the honours. But neither ever lost sight of the fact that they were first and foremost hacks, there to find things out.
Has our Olympic coverage left any trees still standing in Scandanavia?
There was a more obvious name for the Parry Bar. For this really did feel like the Last Chance Saloon. Fleet Street hurled resources and bodies into the fray as if it were the Battle of Stalingrad. The Daily Mail reputedly applied for 90 accreditations and was given 30. And can there be a tree left in Scandinavia? The Daily Telegraph routinely gave the Olympics a 40-page tabloid supplement and the front six pages of the broadsheet.
This was quite obviously an unrepeatable binge for a hard-up industry as well as for a hard-up nation. And when the glory-glory splashes, back-page leads, insiders, quotes pieces, breakouts and graphics were all done, the Parry Bar was the place for maudlin reflections on the bleakness ahead.
“There are two possibilities after the Olympics,” one sports editor had told me beforehand. “Either I will get an email telling me how many people I have to cut. Or I won't get an email. In which case, I'll have been cut.” This much we know: the British media at Rio in 2016 will be leaner and the managements even meaner, and not just because the venue is expensive and faraway. This much we don't know: whether some famous national newspapers will exist by then, in print or at all.
For old Olympics hands this was a strange experience. I kept thinking of an ancient episode of The Avengers in which bowler-hatted John Steed was in a dank cell with a view only of a North Korean guard parading up and down outside. He finally put his hand to the window, discovered it was actually a video screen, then put his fist through it and was greeted by the sight of a passing London bus.
For those in possession of the much-envied accreditation bib, the Olympics are normally a hermetically-sealed world, having more in common with other Olympics than with the real world beyond the security zones. The venue is relevant only in terms of time difference (becoming less relevant as online demands replace deadlines), local colour and the possibilities for downtime — if there is any. Since events go on 18 hours a day and one never knows where the next story will pop up, the Olympics is always knackering in a way unmatched by any assignment outside a war zone.
Since the multiple screw-ups at Atlanta 1996, venues are given little leeway to get things wrong: even the media bus timetables are prescribed in advance. So the main press centre in London varied only in detail from the one in Beijing, though there was one welcome innovation: a well-used quiet room, in recognition of the knackered-factor, full of day beds offering the chance of a quick nap. At the out-venues, the food was nearly always disgusting and the signposting poor. Overall, things were as per usual.
Yet in London, for the British press, normality kept peeking through. Many reporters headed back home to the suburbs at night. And thus the Parry Bar could not, for us locals, match the one at Seoul 1988, when virtually all of us stayed in the same media village, and the bar was packed till sunrise. For those with longer memories than mine it was an even paler shadow. Jim Lawton of The Independent, made his debut at Montreal 1976: “I'll never forget Peter Batt amazing the Russians by leading the singsong with My Old Man Said Follow the Van.“
Yet there was also a certain strangeness, as familiar settings took on disorientating new looks. Lord's, decked out for archery, was particularly surreal: the pavilion gatemen, operating under Olympic rules not MCC's, could only bite their lips as hacks marched past them in T-shirt and shorts, not jacket and tie.
It was disorientating for me too, covering the event for the Financial Times, which was trying to operate from a non-partisan perspective in an atmosphere that often bordered on national hysteria (and doing so most days on 45 pages fewer than the Telegraph's 46). This posed questions for me as a journalist: did I envy Paul Hayward of the Telegraph his excellent 2,000-worders when I only had space for 600? Or was I better off writing where I was less likely to be skipped? Bad days aside, I was happy with my lot.
Britain has become a country of violent mood swings, and the press, and the BBC, appeared to be reflecting accurately a near-universal sense of delight in Britain's haul of gold medals and a feeling that the admirable and determined young people who won them were a fine antidote to the footballers and reality-TV posers who normally dominate the headlines. Quite right too.
But I take the view that sports writers should never refer to a team they cover as “we”, even in conversation. And I sense that, amid the excitement, a great deal of clinical detachment and healthy scepticism was lost. These days countries largely win the medals they pay for. Are we sure an expensive support network for elite athletes is the right national priority — even in pure sporting terms? It is at moments when everyone is thinking the same that the papers — certainly the posher papers — have the greatest duty to stand aside and ask difficult questions. If that happened, I missed it.
However, I didn't read that much. My newsprint piled up on the armchair of my hotel room. Olympic days are like that: I was too busy rushing about. However, did any reader have the time to read even a small proportion of the thousands upon thousands of Olympic words being printed in each paper?
The last pint in the Steve Parry Bar will surely have coincided with the day that the coverage of sport in the British press reached its peak. If the future means more concentration on quality rather than quantity, it may be no bad thing.