![]() ![]() She is the closest thing swimming has to a superstar in the UK. One of the big reasons he wanted to come to Rome, he half-jokingly revealed, was that his mum was very keen to go shopping here.Īdlington, of course, may make a real difference to the sport's popularity in Great Britain. Phelps did the event few favours by treating this tournament as his warm-up comeback from a six-month break spent living out Animal House. He was, it seemed, already beginning to rue the fact that he may have retired a touch too early to catch the boom years.īut is swimming really making much of an impression back home? I'd be interested to hear how much attention the average sports fan on the Guardian's web pages will be paying over the next eight days. For the first time in his experience, he noted, the BBC have sent a news team as well as a sports team to the swimming world championships. Hickman for one thinks that a shift is already happening. "Normally we compete in front of about 200 fans, including the other swimmers and our families." "I just wasn't used to walking out into a stadium full of 17,000 people," she reflected. Dara Torres, captain of the US women's team, spoke recently about the minor nervous breakdown she had suffered at her first big swimming meet. ![]() £25m is a lot of money to spend on a week's worth of headlines, even if they are at the Olympics. At the moment, like so many other sports, it appears on the back pages and at the top of the news bulletins for seven days every four years or so. ![]() Swimming is a sport struggling to make the transition from a minority to a mainstream spectator event. Il Duce's visage, bizarrely, is plastered all across the various friezes that decorate the Ponte Duca D'Aosta which spans the river Tiber on the approach to the stadium, transposed over-and-again onto the bodies of Italian soldiers pictures performing heroic deeds. Even now, after six British medals in the Beijing water cube, the most recognisable face to be seen at this competition, after those of Michael Phelps and Rebecca Adlington, is probably that of Benito Mussolini. The only swimmers who made a serious impression on the British public consciousness in that era were either a) retired and bald or b) retired and infamous for not wearing a bra on TV. Hickman was one of the most successful swimmers Britain has had in the last 15 years, but the sorry fact is that until I looked twice I couldn't tell him apart from any other of the legions of strangers wandering around the stadium. You may remember him best, as I do, coming home seventh in the 200m butterfly at the disappointing Atlanta Olympics. Turns out he was James Hickman, three-time Olympian, five-time short-course world champion. Afterwards I took a second look at his business card. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |