Admiring Olympic athletes from the comfort of my couch

I am not really a sports person, but I stayed up the whole night last week to watch the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.

From my supine position on the sofa in front of the TV, I admired the athletes who looked fit, trim and seemed extremely happy to be taking part in the “Modern Olympic Games”.

I wondered why the Queen called it the “Modern Olympic Games” when she declared it open. So I looked it up. I believe it was a Frenchman named Pierre de Coubertin who revived the Games 1,500 years later after a Christian Roman emperor banned the Ancient Olympic Games because of their pagan influence.

It is said that Coubertin was a boy when France was overrun by the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and he always believed that the defeat was due to the lack of vigour of the French soldiers.

He later checked out the education of the German, British and American children and decided that it was exercise and sports that made a well-rounded and vigorous person. But for years he failed to convince the French about the importance of sports.

Back to the present, and by the time all the athletes from 205 countries, including the crazy, joyful three who did not represent any country but were there as independent athletes, went marching past I was getting a bit bug-eyed as it was slowly getting to be dawn here in Dubai.

My loss of sleep didn’t bother me much, but I later wondered why the Olympics should have interested me so much, even though I am not a sports lover. The last time I took part in a team sport was way back in time and when the captain of the local cricket team looked at me, he made me go and stand near the boundary, where there wasn’t much work to do, except chew on the grass.

Our opponents were terrible batsmen and never could manage to whack the ball for a four. If someone had somehow hit it towards me I doubt if I would have dived and slid on the grass to catch the ball and prevented it from going over the boundary line. Diving headlong on to the ground was never one of my strong points.

Some years earlier, I had joined a judo class at our local YMCA, not because I was interested in the art of self-defence, but because a cute classmate was in the group. Then, one day, the instructor said ominously that we all should learn the art of falling down.

He said that it was important to know how to strike the mat with both arms and hands. That will prevent your head from hitting it when you fall backwards, he said. Then you use your shoulder, thigh and knee joints as shock absorbers, he explained.

I gave up on judo after bruising myself badly and a friend suggested that I take up some safe game such as chess or something that does not involve running or falling.

Listening to the commentary as the athletes marched past at the Olympics, it was evident that except for a handful of countries with a great medals tally, many nations are still terrible at sports and barely have a sports team worth talking about.

Still, it was surprising to see that some of the fattest nations in the world today, such as America, with its Big Macs and plus-sized fries, and Britain, the most obese nation in Europe, field the largest contingent of athletes to the Games. I now know why I love spectator sports and why it is important to pay sports persons huge amounts of money to perform in arenas. Without athletes we may forget that we were once a “vigorous” people and that there was life beyond the couch.