As a country, Britain lurches between overconfidence and arrogance based on a long-dead empire, and a stereotypical sort of self-effacing, prim and proper diffidence. We bumptiously expect a level of international prominence which is no longer truly justified by our economic position, yet we cringe at the ever-intensifying Hollywood showiness of The X Factor.
When it comes to sport, we usually fall into the latter category. England last won the football world cup nearly 50 years ago; there hasn’t been a British men’s winner of Wimbledon for more than 75. So if we obviously can’t win anything, the resigned thinking goes, we should focus on the taking part. At least we still host the world’s best tennis tournament. Thank goodness the English Premier League is still the best in the world, even if most of the top players are foreign-born. And even though everyone seems to have already accepted that London 2012 won’t be as good as Beijing 2008, at least we’ll have the Olympic legacy to fall back on. Although even that it is doubt: the latest figures from Sport England show that weekly participation among the public, a key aspect of the London 2012 bid, has actually dropped in many sports in the last three years. But never mind, eh? At least we had a go.
Give me a break. Football may be the only sport many Brits care about, except for tennis once a year, and rugby every now and again, but our lack of World Cup success is hardly a comprehensive barometer of our sporting ability. For such a small country, we actually have a breadth of talent in a huge variety of sports. In tennis, Andy Murray is closing in on Roger Federer to take the world number 3 spot, the boys team have just won the Junior Davis Cup, and three out of four semi-finalists in the junior boys at the US Open were British. In athletics, we have Jessica Ennis, Phillips Idowu, and the incomparable Mo Farah. At the Berlin marathon last month, Paula Radcliffe began her comeback after a complicated injury, and was disappointed with third place. We have so many world class cyclists and rowers that we don’t know what to do with them. And as I discovered last week at the GB World Cup, we are thriving at judo: -66kg gold medal winner and U-23 European champion Ashley McKenzie is surely a star in the making, yet the sport suffers from such a lack of coverage that it doesn’t even have a page on the BBC sport website.
Surely a better Olympic legacy would be to celebrate our talent and champions across the board, rather than romanticizing the 1966 World Cup, or fretting about mini tennis participation. Sport is one area where we can afford to be confident.
of life and other distractions 