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I enjoyed the opening ceremony so much that from then on I made a point of working out at the gym only when the games were being shown on the telly. I was going flat out beside Christine Ohuruogu, for example, when she won the 400 metres. I was rowing like a man possessed in my support boat (on the rowing machine) when Katherine Grainger and the coxless fours were pipped at the post. And I was going like the clappers on one of the exercise bikes as our four-man pursuit team knocked two seconds off the world record in the Velodrome.
I declined an invitation to join the medal winners on the podium, however, because I had to move over quickly to the treadmill in readiness for a qualifying heat in the women’s 200-metre hurdles. For the final of the men’s 200-metre sprint, there were four of us in a line on the treadmills going hell for leather to keep up with Usain Bolt, the thin Jamaican giant, but he was going away from us with every stride.
Sprinting in a line, even on a line of treadmills, brought back memories of school sports. I ran the 400-, 800- and 1,500-metre races for the school team, and I was in the west Essex cross-country team. I remembered how running sends me almost barmy with excitement. I also remembered how frustrating it is to have your eyes out on stalks and giving it everything you’ve got, only to see the chap in front easing effortlessly away from you with every stride.
At school I would have won every 800 and 1,500 metres I entered, if this bloke with the most metallic-coloured ginger hair I’ve ever seen, name of Christmas, hadn’t been born, raised and sent to the same school as me. We were the same age, height, build, weight. Our lung capacities and levels of stamina and determination were the same. He was also a middle-distance runner, favouring the 800- and 1,500-metre races. But I am flat-footed and this chap Christmas had a springier, more effortless stride, and I could have raced against him until Doomsday and not beaten him. There wasn’t a lot in it, mind. For three years, until I took up smoking, I followed his bright, coppery bonce and those albino-white legs round and round the school running track every summer, straining every fibre of my being to beat him. And he would always stay just in front, close enough for me to tap him on the shoulder and ask him how the time was going if I’d wanted to. It was always Christmas first, Clarke second. The one time we both ran for west Essex, it was Christmas fifth and Clarke sixth.
In the school sports, he and I always left everyone else for dead. But he always beat me to the finishing tape. I can see him now, easing up as he passed it to make it look like a cruise. Like all talented people, he had that bit extra in reserve with which to blow off pedestrians and pretenders. And he was conscious of his superiority and never once acknowledged our rivalry with a word or a look after a race, let alone a handshake. Successive summers spent panting around a running track after this bloke spoiled my idea of Christmas for years afterwards. I wonder how he’s getting on. And I wonder if he’s still numbered among the 25 per cent of the population capable of running a mile.
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