Spectator Sports
On the value of spending 3 hours watching two men hit a ball
Yesterday, I watched all three hours and four minutes of Jannik Sinner vs Carlos Alcaraz in the Men’s Wimbledon Final. Not quite as long as the five and a half hours they played for in the French Open Final a month ago, but still a decent chunk of time.
This year, I’ve been tracking how much sport I watch, because I love creating metadata about myself (so far I’ve watched or listened to forty football matches, plus most of the F1, quite a lot of cycling and some of the big tennis matches. And the final round of Rory McIlroy’s Masters win, but not the actual winning moment, because I fell asleep before the playoff).
Anyway, last year I was doing something else during Stage 11 of the Tour de France, which caused me so much distress I decided to write a 2000-word essay about it. Here it is.
The Endless Cycle
I missed Stage 11 of the Tour de France yesterday.
By all accounts (and I’ve watched/listened to a lot of them) it was one of the greatest stages ever, with Tadej Pogacar attacking 30km from the finish and leaving his rivals dead in the water, only for Jonas Vingegaard — who has only just recovered from a life-threatening crash — to slowly reel him in and beat him in a sprint at the end.
For whatever reason, my annoyance at having missed out on watching this live was one of those things which stuck with me for more than a few moments. The same kind of feeling I get sometimes when I have a bad week at fantasy football (something I’m going to try and avail myself of in the coming season), a gentle, tingling anxiety that I have made a grave mistake.
I used to have a recurring dream where I was scything through some undergrowth, frantically chasing something (or being chased), only to realise when I got out that I had just missed out on a million pounds (it must have been some kind of Mr Beast/Squid Game competition I was competing in). This is a low-level version of that feeling.
But why would I have this feeling about having missed out on a Tour de France stage, albeit an exceptional one? I didn’t have this feeling when I missed the Spain-Germany quarter-final last week, which was just as exciting in a different way.
Perhaps it’s because of what I was doing instead of watching it. On Friday, I was out for a run while the match was on, and came back absolutely pumped full of endorphins. Yesterday I had spent the day mucking about on my phone, watching stupid poker videos with my brother on the telly, and had gone for a shower at 3 o’clock-ish, when the stage was coming to a close.
Intentionality
Is it also because I have been feeling unfulfilled by my life of lazing around and watching sports this week, anyway? So to fail to even manage that makes a mockery of my supposedly relaxing week.
I went for a run with my friend’s running club on Tuesday, and told a bunch of people about how I had quit my job and moved to the Highlands. They all asked what I was going to do for a job, and I told them the plan was to muck about for a year and see what happens, but is that really the best way of spending one’s time?
Before I quit my job, a day spent watching sports would have sounded ideal — and it can be very nice — but there’s a nagging feeling that always hits me when I spend a long amount of time at home that I am being unproductive. I get up late, I do a minimal amount of work, watch some sports, watch some films, and go to bed.
Is that not a good day? Am I still caught up in the idea that every moment of every day needs to be productive, or is there something genuinely unfulfilling about a life filled with enjoyable things? Is it possible to have too much of a good thing?
Or am I just being melodramatic?
The problem, as usual, is a lack of intentionality. I am moving through the days with no direction, doing what I please in each given moment. A day spent watching a film, then some sports, then going for a run, with a little bit of writing thrown in the middle, should be a good day. Is a good day.
But when all of the activities are scattered together throughout the day, and strung together by long periods of watching stupid poker videos on YouTube, or playing an indeterminate number of games of chess (which isn’t a bad thing in itself. Its only bad when it isn’t intentional, when it comes out to fill a brief moment of downtime) making the day itself feel adrift. A floating existence with nothing concrete to hang your hat on.
So what really annoys me is that I didn’t check what kind of stage it was, so that I could plan it into the day. Or that there is no plan for the days at all. Even when you do a lot of things on a day when there is no plan, it is easy to ascribe it as a failure. You haven’t achieved anything you set out to achieve, because you didn’t set out to achieve anything.
Maybe the solution to this is to make schedules for every day — let’s see how that goes. First, I will have to schedule the schedule creation — what comes first, the schedule or the schedule setting?
Athens, Beijing, Make Britain Great Again
In 2004, when the Athens Olympics were on, I remember watching pretty much every event I could get my eyes on. Voraciously hoovering up things like the modern pentathlon and canoe slalom. In my memory, I watched almost every event — close to 100% coverage — which would not have been anywhere close to possible.
The same feels like it was true for Beijing - Michael Phelps’ eight golds - and London - Andy Murray winning Gold in the tennis, the Chris Hoy bike throw to win on the line. Super Saturday, Jess Ennis, Greg Rutherford, Mo Farah. Countless more moments that I was there for.
It has become a bit of a joke against centrists to mock them when they talk about how London 2012 was the last time we felt unified as a nation. There are plenty of reasons to mock them for this, not least the fact that we were beginning to head down the path of mass austerity, which crippled the nation’s public services, leaving many people destitute.
London 2012, specifically the opening ceremony, would be the dictionary definition of ‘bread and circuses’ if not for the proliferation of food banks over the decade and a half of Tory rule (oh look, he’s getting political again).
It was a big party with the eyes of the world on our country, and we made sure we looked beautiful.
That being said, there definitely was a sense of togetherness embodied by the athletes and the victories they had. If the inspiration garnered by all of the gold medals had been properly harnessed by a program of investment in sport and exercise, then it could have had a very special legacy.
C’mon Andy
For 2016, my biggest memory is watching Andy Murray retain his gold medal against Juan Martin del Potro, and the Tokyo games in 2021 were marred by Covid and didn’t have the ideal time difference to watch. Plus, the fact that I was working full time meant that I didn’t see as much as I would have liked.
The highlights for those games were the Duncan Scott swimming medals. I have a distinct memory of racing against him in the Scottish National Age Group Championships (AKA the SNAGs). I was a few years older than him, and a lot bigger than him at the time, and there are two races I can remember.
In one, the scoreboard of which my mum took a photo (I don’t know why she did this for this particular race, because she didn’t do it every time), I narrowly beat him. In the second, which must have come after the first, I recall very clearly standing next to this beanpole of a boy, around 20cm in diameter, and thinking, ‘You’ve got no chance’.
He blew me out of the water, and if I’m being overly poetic, I’d say that I knew then that he’d go far. In reality, there were plenty of people who used to beat me, and if they’d all made it to the Olympics they’d need a bigger pool, but it put a big smile on my face waking up to see that the wee guy who’d trounced me that one time was now trouncing everyone else too.
Back to 2024, and the Paris Olympics start in a few weeks. I’d been planning on watching every single minute of coverage, just as I did when I was eight years old. And twelve years old, and sixteen…
But if I think about it (and I’ve looked up the Scottish school term times from 2004 to confirm this), I would have been at school for most of the day for the majority of those Olympics. Then after school, I would have had football training, or tennis, or had to go to the shops with mum. Or to pick up my younger brothers from football training, or tennis, or from the shops with mum.
Then in ‘08 and ‘12, I would have had even more on top of school. Band practice with the trombone on Mondays and Fridays, swimming three or four times on top of that. Boys’ Brigade on a Friday. So even if I watched the Olympics for the rest of the time I had available, I would have missed a bunch of stuff. Maybe I just caught up by watching the BBC summary at the end of each day.
Plus, I would have been happy just watching whatever was on at the time I was able to watch. I wouldn’t have been so hyper-focused on catching everything I possibly could. And when I wasn’t watching, I was doing something that was more fun anyway, wasn’t I?
All of which is to say, I think I have a plan for the Olympics, combining what I’ve learned from all this rambling and the trip down nostalgia lane.
Ahead of the games, I need to make a list of what’s happening each day which I might want to watch. And then rank them all in priority from a must-watch to a would-be-nice to watch.
I then have to fill a portion of my day up with other things — writing, reading, going for walks, cooking, playing a board game, doing a puzzle. Things which can fill a day when there is no sport on. Because a full day spent in front of the TV watching sport never feels fulfilling. Or it sometimes does — but a few weeks of it wouldn’t. And it feels like you’ve earned it more when you’ve gone for a big walk, or written six pages of a novel, or painted a wall orange and built half a bookshelf.
If there is an opportunity to go out and do something, then this can only ever be trumped by a must-watch situation, and even then, it can sometimes be missed.
Bringing it back to this year, I didn’t see the French Open final because I was out for a walk with some friends who were visiting. And I didn’t feel the sense of regret that I felt about the Tour de France stage because I was doing something more worthwhile.
I love watching sports, and have had some great times watching sport this year - seeing Arsenal beat Real Madrid with a load of Arsenal fans in a bar in Madrid comes to mind as a highlight - but I do need to remember that I only feel bad about missing it if I’m not doing something else fun.