Sitting in front of the television can build a worrying relationship with sport. Event after event washes past. It's one great athlete after another. It blurs and it gets a little like a chocolate habit. You want more, and then more. That leads to bad thoughts.
Like, what
about pepping things up a bit? Let's get the protective gear off the fencers. Draw blood in the early rounds and you win. In the final it's a gold medal, and a million bucks. That'd get some serious sword fighting rolling.
Or, for the middle distance races, when the field begins to straggle and stop racing, let it be known there's no medal but a million for the guy finishing fourth to last. You want skill and tactics? Get a look at that.
Then something comes along to wipe that out, one of those humbling moments when you see the pain, the suffering, and the will to be the best wrenching out from every pore.
The jokes stop, and its admiration for the courage needed to keep going.
That was the women's road race. Thirty miles into the seventy-eight mile course the rain started. Not just rain. Heavy, bucketing, blinding, thundering-down rain.
In a course with hard climbs and high-speed descent raw survival got thrown in to one of the toughest examinations of character and will the Olympics can produce.
No crowds cheered them. The women fought a lonely battle in the pack. Three hundred metres out Nicole Cooke inched ahead of a Swede and an Italian. After two hours and change - its inches! A hard sprint was just ahead, against a body screaming up, 'Enough is enough!'
The commentator was saying 'Two hundred metres out that the leader is not in control, it's usually the second or third who makes a break past them.'
The straining, pumping Cooke wasn't having that. It was impossible not to feel every soaked push on those pedals, all the way to winning by less than a wheel length.
Seventy-eight miles and she wins by less than half a metre. Eighteen inches!
That stone killed the cynicism.
There's my early favourite for this Games' superstar. Wales and Great Britain's Nicole Cooke.
Photo / AP
