It’s not too impressive inside the press bubble

By PETER CALDER

I know. I know. The Olympics are meant to be about international understanding and realising that we are all part of the human family and all that.

And I know that - mercifully - a nation should not be judged by its journalists. Donald Woods, who suffered house arrest and self-exile in his battle for justice for the murdered Steven Biko, was scarcely representative of the fourth estate in South Africa at the time.

And the man on the night desk at the Sun in London who suggested, when I was following up the Sunday Mirror's story about Mark Todd that I "scalp the quotes and dress them up as your own" should not be taken as a template of the British, most of whom don't believe in theft.

But a fortnight or more in the company of the press corps - more than 25,000 of them when I last counted - who are here in Olympic City hasn't done much to dispel the impressions of national character that I have picked up over the years.

The media here have moved in a hermetically sealed environment, separated from the public by high fences and moving along roadways in a city within a city. That's kept me out of touch with real people a lot of the time - although when I find any I routinely engage them in conversation just to get a sense of what things look like when you're outside this bubble.

But the sad, simple fact is, most of my contact has been with other journalists and not all of them have done their nations proud.

I've done my share of fuming over the propensity of Asians to ignore queues. I once had it explained to me that it's because they come from cities so densely populated that they don't see people, they see the spaces between them and move to occupy them. What else could explain the moment when another journo (a Spaniard as it turned out) and I each stood aside to let the other go first through a narrow space between two tables - and a Chinese behind me, without breaking stride, swerved past and through the gap.

Americans the world over seem incapable of conducting any conversation at a volume lower than that emitted by a pneumatic drill. Ditto, squared, the American press. When these folks take a mobile call, so far from turning away to talk in private, they lift their heads up, the better to project their voices (if they are sitting they stand) and begin every sentence with: "You know what?"

"I know that I wish you'd shut up," I growl. The volume seems to increase.

(The Americans, too, seem to have only one question to ask of an athlete at a press conference. "How did you feel when ... " they ask. An occasional variant is, "What was going through your mind?").

The buses that ferry us around the Olympic sites are plainly marked with destination signs. The Germans don't worry about them. "The Dome?" they ask a woman with "Media Village" plainly displayed on her windscreen. When the sign is pointed out to them, they ask louder.

The Swedes get excited when you ask them about handball. You can tell they are getting excited because their lips move, though the lugubrious faces still suggest they remain in the grip of some existential angst.

The Japanese have laptops the size of cellphones and cellphones the size of matchboxes. As far as I can gather, they use one or other (and sometimes both) for all of their waking hours. They never seem actually to watch the sporting event they are at. And if you talk to them they shake their heads. If they are trying to discourage contact, it works.

The Russians meanwhile, smoking enthusiastically, wish they had laptops and seem to wonder what a cellphone is.

The Latin Americans swagger - particularly when they are around the Spaniards, as if trying to show them that the mother (or should that be "madre") country is not one step ahead of its former dominions.

The rest of us sweat in the 30 deg heat; the French women perspire quietly and it smells like eau de framboise au chocolat.

But the easiest ones to spot are the Australians. Their sentences about athletic competition are all about what "we" did (they have to name the athletes in the introductions to their stories but in conversation all achievements are national not individual).

And they don't bother to be polite to the New Zealanders.

They know instinctively that encouraging some of that Northern Hemisphere hard currency to come back would be good for everyone. But they don't waste any welcome on us.

They would rather we went home and stayed there.