Let’s Rip Those Brits To Bits And Other Australian Olympic Sports

DID you know that Great Britain, or Team GB as the brand says, scored more gold medals than Australia at the China Olympics?

And did you know what else – the best bit about it is? The Australians cared. They cared enough to produce a film of “a posturing Pom” - “a Brit with a mouth as wide as the Thames” – telling Australians:

“You haven’t got what it takes . . . the only gold you will be picking up is from a chocolate wrapper.”

Indeed. Britons are no longer whingeing Poms. Britons are gloating, brash, cock-sure winners.

“Let’s rip the Brits to bits in London 2012,” comes the Aussie slogan.

Higher. Faster. Sadder. That’s the new motto of the Australian Olympic movement. If there one thing that makes winning a swimming medal worthwhile it is seeing the loser take it to heart.

Britain Expects

Of course the message is all wrong. Britain’s new motto may be Dipso Tesco Asbo, but we are noble sports to a man and had the Australians only asked we’d have most likely given them a medal for turning up, or invented new game for them to win.

As Anorak’s sporting legend Ed Barrett has previously noted:

During the Ashes series in 2002, we wrote about the tiresome claims of Australians faithfully echoed by our own (largely Australian-owned) media that theirs is a nation of sporting champions.

We easily demolished this fantasy, pointing out that Australians, like the Americans with their so-called World Series baseball, are careful to concentrate on sports that nobody else plays or at least, nobody English.

We pointed out that cricket is a peripheral pastime in this country, and that when Shane Warne one of the best players of all-time – played for Hampshire he got paid for a whole season what a top Premiership footballer would earn in a week. The only time most Englishmen watch cricket is when the Australians come to town, and then it’s a bit like watching the Harlem Globetrotters with lots of clever tricks, but of no real importance.

The other sports at which the Aussies excel are similarly unimportant. Rugby Union is more popular than cricket, but is basically a marginal sport and the Aussies couldn’t even win the World Cup in their own country. Rugby League (or football as they insist on calling it) is an even more irrelevant sport than Union, when considered world-wide.

When we turned to two genuinely international mens sports - football and boxing - we pointed out that the Australian record is woeful. Football (or soccer as they say) is still basically the province of immigrants in Australia. Admittedly, some half-decent Australian players are emerging, but they have to move to Europe in order to ply their trade.

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Anorak

Posted: 8th, December 2008 | In: Key Posts, Sports Comments (5) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink

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