In principle triathlon should be interesting to watch.  Superfit athletes, male and female, cutting straight through the monotony of single-issue athletics by [...]]]>

'ready,steady,go'

Saturday afternoon, and it’s the Hyde Park World Championship Series Triathlon on BBC 1.  This is the sport you get on terrestrial for 142.50 a year.  It went on for hours.  And hours.   

In principle triathlon should be interesting to watch.  Superfit athletes, male and female, cutting straight through the monotony of single-issue athletics by combining three events in one.  It’s probably quite interesting to do, making sure there are no muscles that don’t hurt by the end of the day and riding a bicycle 40 kilometres in a swimsuit.

 Unfortunately, incongruous clothing doesn’t make for great sporting TV, otherwise we’d already have gymnastics in dungarees, probably on Eurosport. 

 The problem with triathlon as a spectator event is that the first two disciplines – swimming and cycling – don’t obviously influence the end result.  They last for over an hour, two races that are irrelevant to the real race, which is decided in the final 10,000 metre run.

 Neither the swimming nor the bicycling are boring in themselves, but triathlon makes them so.  The Tour de France is fascinating because there’s a purity to watching the best cyclists on earth excel at what they do best.  The same is true of Olympic 10 kilometre swimming.  The triathletes are not the world’s best swimmers or cyclists, and neither the 1500 metre swim nor the 40 km bike ride is long enough for a narrative to develop.  The contenders stick together.  That’s all they have time to do.

 There’s the endurance, which is worth admiring.  I also admire the endurance of Chinese agricultural workers, but I don’t want to watch them for 210 minutes on a Saturday afternoon on BBC 1.

 So the contest boils down to a 10,000-metre road race in which the athletes start off very tired.  They could skip, or saw logs.  It would be just as interesting and have the same effect.

 It doesn’t help triathlon’s cause that the BBC are discovering the sport as the same time as the audience.  About half way through the swimming I could hear mouths dry as the commentary team realized there wasn’t much to say, and then half-way through the cycling when the awful truth dawned that this might be boring all the way through.

The commentators handbook has strict instructions for this eventuality: compensate by saying how exciting everything is.  At one point the rictus presenter Graham Bell dreamed fondly of a ‘really, really exciting climax.’  Dream on, Graham.  The veteran BBC commentator Stuart Storey moved from dreams to feelings – ‘I have a feeling the end will be quite interesting.’

 It didn’t help that the commentary and camera teams seemed unconnected.  ‘Is that the Swede?  We’ll have a look when we can,’ or that the cameras missed the occasional interesting moment, like the Spanish favourite falling off his bicycle, or a man breaking his foot in transition by getting his toes stuck between his spokes. 

Oh yes, the transition.  I know some people who’ve done that, but not in triathlon, and I’m prepared to bet that the transgender transition is more interesting to watch than damp athletes changing their shoes.

This essentially is the problem.  If neither the swimming nor the cycling can help find a winner, then top level Triathlon becomes a contest in how fast you can change your shoes.  Competitive slip-ons, live on BBC 1.

While researching an article for the recent book Pembroke in our Time, I trawled the post-war Pembroke Gazettes for evidence of patterns in Pembroke sport.  We turn out to be stubborn in pursuit of victory yet good-humoured should it escape.  We can be over-enthusiastic (the 1990 tennis team played ninety minutes [...]]]> Martlet: Issue 13 Spring 2009

While researching an article for the recent book Pembroke in our Time, I trawled the post-war Pembroke Gazettes for evidence of patterns in Pembroke sport.  We turn out to be stubborn in pursuit of victory yet good-humoured should it escape.  We can be over-enthusiastic (the 1990 tennis team played ninety minutes of football between two rounds of Cuppers), drily unshakeable (‘the sight of blood on the wicket,’ reports the cricket captain in 1992, ‘is never pleasing to an incoming batsman’), and sometimes shockingly obsequious (the 1948 Debating Society conveyed congratulations to Prince Elizabeth on her engagement).

These are all curiosities that for reasons of space I was unable to include in the book.  Another was the demise of the Pembroke Mile.

In the history of College sport, any innovation lasting for more than three years is instantly considered timeless.  Various Pembroke teams, notably the Pathfinders, the Pint-pots, the Prawns and the Perfectionists, were once considered imperishable features of Pembroke life.  This mid-century affection for nouns beginning with P was perhaps always destined to fade.

Not so the Pembroke Mile, a College running race that owes its existence to a pleasing geographical coincidence.  The distance from the Pembroke sports pavilion to the College front gate is exactly one mile.  Geography is no longer offered by the College, so no-one is immediately available with a trundle wheel to check the distance.  Instead, we have Google Earth – a mile, says the computer, exactly a mile, otherwise known to athletes as the classic middle-distance challenge.

Encouraged by a sense of sporting providence, as were earlier Pembroke generations, I set about discovering as much as I could about the original race.  The event is first recorded in a post-war Gazette in 1947, and then makes various appearances until 1952.  In that year it was contested by teams in fancy dress, and won somewhat inevitably by the Rugby Club.

The Pembroke Mile is often mentioned as if it hardly needs a mention – suggesting a much richer history than the Gazette is able to reveal.  A few years ago, for clarification, I could have popped in for a mug of gin with James Campbell.  In his much-missed absence, I contacted some former Captains of Athletics.

The response was astonishing, and I can state without reservation that running as an undergraduate contributes to mental sprightliness sixty years on.  It quickly became clear that the Mile was mainly a rugby club affair, or as darkly suggested by J.E.Joliffe (1947) an invention of ‘the Little Rose Crowd.’  Traffic then as now was a danger, or in the words of Graham Clarke (1945-1948 and 1951-1953) a ‘significant problem.’

Mr Clarke is the only recorded winner and therefore remains the official record-holder with a time of five minutes flat.  ‘It was intended to be more of a gala event than a serious race’, he writes, ‘and participants were encouraged to adopt fancy dress.  However it became clear that members of the Pembroke Athletics club in normal running gear were entering, and they were evident at the line-up.’

No ordinarily competitive Pembroke athlete could let the opportunity slip.  The serious runners risked getting embroiled in the more frivolous skirts and gowns of the fancy-dress contingent, especially when overtaking on narrow pavements.  Then they had to deal with the hazards of unmarshalled road-crossings.  In the year of his victory, Graham Clarke was paced to the finish by his friend John Moore on a bicycle, before collapsing triumphant on the forecourt lawn.  He still regrets not calling for beer or champagne (for the runners-up), but ‘was too exhausted to think of it at the time.’

The existence of an official Pembroke Mile trophy is never quite a certainty, but my correspondents hint insistently at the memory of the possibility of a glimpse of an engraved winner’s cup.

Peter Francon Smith (1949-1952) reminds me that this was, after all, nearly sixty years ago.  He was the organiser of the Pembroke Mile of 1950, but thinks the race was being run before the war.  1950 was the year, on an early autumn afternoon, that they erected a table on the grass by Fen Causeway -  the half-way point – and every runner had to drink half a pint of beer before continuing to the finish.

Through the many generous replies I received, the dry sporting humour I recognise from the Gazette is often evident: ‘Only Pembroke men were entitled to enter (ladies had not been invented at that time),’ as is a mood of game defiance: ‘I think it has taken me longer to write this letter than the running time of the Pembroke Mile.’

All my former Athletics captains were enthusiastic about the prospect of reviving the event (‘a fun race enjoyed by all’) and I can’t help but agree with them.  It would of course need today’s undergraduates to provide the energy and enthusiasm – qualities I’m told they have to spare.  If the taste for revivals takes hold, then next on the list is the Coxswain’s VIII, as crewed in 1950 – the year the Master decided to act as cox.  Now that would be something to see.