Let ordinary mortals underline how extraordinary Olympians are

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

A wit suggested on Twitter that – in order for the rest of us to realise how difficult Olympic Games disciplines are, and how talented the elite athletes who contest them are too – you’d need to tee it up by asking an ordinary, unfit, uncoordinated member of the public to give it a go first.

Take gymnastics as an example; these ultra-flexible competitors who fling themselves from two parallel bars or form a crucifix on the rings eight or ten feet off the ground, or who vault into the clouds, or spin ten different ways through the air from a standing start and land like a stone on soft sand.

And yet, experts that we become after an hour or two watching the telly, we wince when they get it just the smallest bit wrong – ‘marks gone there; not a solid landing that time’ kind of thing.

The reality is that, if we were doing it, we’d be lucky to just hang onto the rings for ten seconds without ripping our arms from their sockets, never mind extending them to make rock-solid right angles with our bodies.

Even the floor routine would be a hundred steps too far, unless it becomes a thing to embrace a little bit of dad-dancing and maybe breaking into a helicopter spin, just as a final nod to our disco days.

How about taking a shot at dressage – or as comedian Laura Lexx put it in her Twitter suggestion, getting on a horse and trying to make her dance like a sexy crab on ants?

Or the pole vault, where you give someone a massive length of Wavin pipe and persuade them to use that to try and jump over a bar that’s roughly the height of the roof on their own house.

White-water rafting – where the best you could hope for was not to drown, followed by not getting knocked-out by those gates you’re supposed to sally through as though you’re ambling over a stile on a relaxing country walk.

Instead, we tut and sigh when they glance off these gates as though they’d failed to reverse-park a small car into two adjoining parking spots.

Read the full column in this week’s Connacht Tribune, on sale in shops now – or you can download the digital edition from www.connachttribune.ie