Comment

Right now it feels like the whole country is falling apart. Thank God for British athletes

Chris Froome waves in front of the Arc de Triomphe after winning the Tour de France
It's shaping up to be another summer of sporting delight to rival 2012's

Va va Froome. In collecting his third Tour de France victory, the Kenyan-born cyclist has made himself Britain’s sporting star of the summer, an athlete whose unsurpassed achievements surely place him in the pantheon of all-time accomplishment.

Yes, Froome is surely the nailed-on favourite for British Sports Personality of the Year. Except, of course, for the fact that Andy Murray’s just won Wimbledon. Again.

And you’ve got to admire Joe Root, haven’t you? Or Maro Itoje, the driving (and rucking, and line-out-ing) force behind England’s rugby union grand slam victory and the clean sweep against the Aussies and the domestic and European double for Saracens. And then there’s… look, just let me get back to you after the Olympics, would you?

The abominable (and entirely predictable) failure of the England football team may have cast something of a pall over the sporting summer in some quarters. But elsewhere, we’ve never had it so good.

Lewis Hamilton is winning races again. Even when it comes to football, Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey and the rest of the Welsh players played like lions (or rather dragons) in their run to the semi-finals of the European Championships. Not forgetting Northern Ireland, of course.

Just as politics these days seems to be a case of one damned thing after another, so does sport. But in the latter case, the things are rather more welcome.

A few years back, we’d have had to sustain ourselves on, say, the rise of Itoje (“Can you believe the boy hasn’t lost a match he’s started in since May 2015?”).

Mathematicians produced elaborate analyses to show how that Britain just didn’t have enough people playing sport to complete in all the sports we were trying to be good at.

Most other countries, they said, would pick football and a couple of others, rather than stupidly believing they could be genuine contenders at football, rugby (two codes), cricket, golf, athletics and so on and so forth. (Honourable exception here for the Australians, but they’ve got the climate for it.)

In other words, if you’re willing to look beyond football –and I know it’s hard for some people –  then being a British sports fan is pretty damn great at the moment.

And even there, we’ve got the prospect of Jose Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and Antonio Conte going head to head with the incumbents, of magic and lunacy from Zlatan Ibrahimovic, possibly even the fight of Paul Pogba in full majestic stride.

There are times when sporting greatness and national happiness fuse into one beautiful whole – the summer of 1996 springs to mind, until Paul Gascoigne missed that sitter in the semi-final against Germany, or more recently the golden days of 2012, when Bradley Wiggins shattered Britain’s duck in the Tour de France before our all-conquering squadron of Olympians gave us a fortnight of rapturous delight.

This year, the national mood is rather different: what with all the deaths and destruction, the political uncertainty, the sense of national division and discord, we’re feeling less happy and glorious than ever, and not that united a kingdom.

Things have got so bad that joking petitions are circulating urging that 2016 itself be abolished. But at a time when many people are feeling pretty bloody miserable, British sport and British sportsmen are fulfilling their duty by providing escapist entertainment of the finest kind.

 

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