I love KJT and she’s always been such a private person this book was a great opportunity to get inside the mentality and ride that heptathlon rollercoaster with her. It’s a great read, from the early athletics days to participating in an Olympics so quickly, and that drive to keep pushing and achieve goals. We go through the various Olympics and that horror show that was Tokyo, and it’s really fascinating to read about how you can come back from that. Plus there’s insight into family life and everything that is sacrificed to get that elusive Olympic medal.

Over recent years, I’ve not given the Winter Olympics the attention it deserves. I wrote about it in 2014 and you can tell in that post I’m in two minds about the whole concept. Well, that all changed this past fortnight, with the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy. The coverage in the UK was with TNT Sports, on Discovery+, but they included it in the £3.99 price plan which is an absolute bargain. If that was too much, though, there were elements available on the BBC - although from what I’ve heard they continued the tradition of mostly watching curling non-stop.

With the joy of the Olympics still fresh in our minds, former sprinter and gold medal winner Michael Johnson has announced a new athletics competition that he’s launching to keep the momentum of the sport going through the four year gaps between Olympic sessions. He’s calling it the Grand Slam Track, and the initial format imitates that of the tennis tours - with four big meets during the year to see the best face off against each other.

I had planned to write about the closing ceremony but in the end, it didn’t grab me as much as I’d hoped. It seemed to pick up pace after Tom Cruise threw himself into the mix, quite literally, but I was already asleep by then, and it sort of feels not worth watching on replay. Although clips and pictures I’ve seen do make me excited for LA’s hosting stint when it begins.

So look, it turns out, watching two weeks of non-stop sport pretty much all day, every day can be a bit much. I’m a gibbering wreck. But I’m also still loving it and don’t want it to end tomorrow. It’s hard to reconcile the two positions but I’m powering through to enjoy every minute before the main Olympics disappears for another four years and we can turn our attention to the Paralympics.

In the last Olympics post, I mentioned that I’ve been watching the surfing which is new to me (and relatively new to the Olympics) and that’s one of the joys of this competition as a viewer - finding those odd sports that you’ve never heard of before and that absolutely captivate you.

So far, I’m loving everything I’ve seen of the 2024 Olympics. Obviously, I’ve not been able to cover off everything that was on my spreadsheet schedule, even with as many screens open as possible. There’s an overwhelming amount of sport - and this is just for the events I’m hugely interested in, never mind the ones that could get my attention if I caught a glimpse.

The Paris 2024 Olympics got underway yesterday with an Opening Ceremony that will be a talking point, even if it wasn’t quite as successful as the organisers hoped. It was different, which always ruffles feathers, and it was inconsistent and messy but there was a lot to like in there. It’s hard for me not to compare everything to the London 2012 Opening Ceremony which was legendary, but each of them are different beasts.

I have been really looking forward to the upcoming Olympics. It’s in a sensible timezone for me, I have managed to wangle some time off work to watch as much as possible and hey, it’s summer of sport fun! I’ve pulled together my spreadsheet of which sports are on when, only for the ones I’m interested in, obviously, and I’m hoping to refine that each day to make sure I’ve got a timetable of the best viewing available.

This is Simone Biles’s story of getting to the Rio 2016 Olympics and becoming one of the most decorated gymnasts ever. It’s a courageous story of dealing with whatever life throws at you and coming out stronger, fitter, faster, better - standing by what you believe in and making sure that you keep things fun even when the pressure is high. It’s a good story, told well, and an interesting first chapter in Biles’ journey. However, I do feel like there’s more to be told, after everything that’s happened post-Rio. Who knows if there’ll be another book, but if there is, I’ll be reading and highly recommending it, no doubt. These are inspirational stories from someone so young.

It’s not ideal, is it, having to host an Olympic Games during an enduring worldwide pandemic. Tokyo 2020 delayed their games by a year and still it didn’t feel like it was really the right time to go ahead with it. But when would be the right time? That’s the difficult question. Many, many precautions were put in place and still athletes were having to self-isolate after catching or being pinged about a potential exposure to Covid.

I was expecting this to be quite like the Molly Bloom film, based as it is on a real life Winter Olympics athlete going slightly rogue. But actually, it wasn’t like that at all - it was packed full of dark humour, characters speaking to camera, disagreements about whether things actually happened or not, and a generally slightly lighter tone.

I’ve been paying a bit more attention to my Apple Watch exercise rings again recently, and although I usually work on a week by week basis, I was perusing the history in the accompanying iPhone app. There, you can see how you’ve done each month and it’s also a good way of comparing days, ie. seeing if you often take Fridays off. I was surprised, however, going back a couple of months, to see a trend I hadn’t really noticed at the time.

Loved this. I didn’t actually know the full story of Eddie the Eagle, only that he was an Olympic hero for NOT being very good. Post-film trivia suggests this film takes big liberties with the story, but the fundamentals are there.

I wasn’t expecting much from this Olympics, I’ll be honest. It felt like there was no way Team GB could live up to their amazing performance at the home games in London, there was so much talk of drug cheats and athletes being banned, several athletes opting not go due to potential Zika/health problems, and on top of all that the concerns that Rio would be able to pull it all off without a hitch anyway.

It felt like the film grew and grew on me as we watched. You have to really stick with it at the start because she’s not a nice character at all, even knowing what happened to her. But, just as she herself goes on a journey, she drags you along with her and I grew to love the character and the story, and really started rooting for everyone involved until I was super caught up and emotional about the whole thing!

This is a film that many people have told me to watch, it’s something of a cult classic and has definitely been popular amongst Sidepodcast readers. That always worries me though, when something is so beloved I’m always concerned that I’m not going to get it or like it and that might be a problem.

The Winter Olympics drew to a close last night, with one of those closing ceremonies that include about ten minutes of fireworks. I don’t get fireworks at all. Anyway, the games themselves saw two weeks of triumphs and controversies and tears and flowers, and all sorts of stuff. I really didn’t get to see as much of the games as I wanted, but unlike the London 2012 fortnight, in which I wrote off the rest of my life in favour of solid TV viewing, I couldn’t afford to hand over too much of my time to Sochi.

I remember hearing an interview with the author of Gold a long while ago and thought it sounded interesting, particularly as Olympics fever was gripping the nation. I didn’t get round to reading it until now, but the Winter Olympics are on at the moment, so perhaps that can be my excuse!

Whilst my previous posts on this subject have been bullet point notes of things that have stood out for me, I can’t do the same for this one. Already, the specific details are beginning to fade from my brain, and we’re only one day post-Olympics. Mo was brilliant, obviously. There were some great final moments in the modern pentathlons, weird as they are. Tom Daley’s diving on Friday was fantastic, not just because he got the medal, but because the overall standard was so incredibly high.

The book is made up of several chapters detailing what it is to take a gold medal at the Olympics - how much work goes in to it, all the unexpected things that come along with it, and what it’s like to try and stay at the top of your game. Michael Johnson talks us through his own career history, as well as interviewing other top athletes from track and field, plus swimming and cycling as well.

As with my previous post, here are just some random thoughts from the last few days of competition. The Men’s 400m final was brilliant. Not only were there twins in the race, but they crossed the line at almost exactly the same time! They came 5th and 6th and were just two hundredths of a second apart! Of course, you can’t talk about brothers without mentioning the Brownlee duo who finished the Men’s Triathlon in gold and bronze positions. A fact someone was kicking about at work was that if the Brownlee family was a country, they’d have been 36th in the medal table. Ridiculously happy that Beth Tweddle got a medal. After such a great career and kickstarting gymnastics in this country, she deserved it. A little sad it wasn’t of a different colour, because we know she could produce the goods after her bars performance in qualifying, but still. A medal! We made the silly mistake of going out this weekend, which meant we had to find a bar to watch Jess Ennis secure her gold medal. Sitting in front of a TV screen with very low volume, Mr C and myself plus a few other people gathered to watch her cross the line in the 800m in first place. There was polite clapping. I’d secretly hoped for cheering, but there weren’t very many of us so clapping was the best we could do. I’m a little bit confused by the sports that have such a long endurance-style event - tennis, football, hockey. All these group fixtures and rounds seem immensely unfair. For example, the weightlifting, athletics, hockey - you get one day or one night to prove you can do what you do and that’s it. A medal rests on your performance on that day and you have to live with the result. Heats and semi-finals to knock the number of competitors down are fine, but these sports that are like mini-tournaments just don’t seem in-keeping with the same philosophy. Bit disappointed in the cycling. After getting confused with the pelican, I was looking forward to the action in the velodrome before realising there are no normal races. If it’s not slipstreaming this and that, it’s following an old guy on a pace bike, or playing cat and mouse. What happened to good old fashioned pedalling as fast as you can until you cross the line? For the first few days, I was a bit overwhelmed with all the choice, and ultimately came to the conclusion that there was too much! I was trying to catch up with things I’d missed during the day whilst the action was still going on, watching two screens at once and mostly coming back with very little taken in. In the end, I realised that what I needed to do was tune in to BBC1 HD and let Gary Lineker talk me through everything I needed to know. Once I relaxed into that, it’s been a gazillion times better. Who knew there really could be too much choice? In my last post, I said it was a great feeling when we won that first gold medal, because we weren’t always winning them all the time. Our first taste of metal was glorious and created a real buzz. Since then, they’ve been flooding in and we’re now sitting third in the medal table! I don’t understand what it is to be a country that wins stuff! Of course, there are still the more manageable moments where we go out of the football on penalties but this is a new, inspired Britain! I’m assuming the home advantage is playing a big part in this and in Rio things will be more normal, but even so, it does seem like we’re getting good at this crazy sporting business. Unreal to think that there are just, at time of posting (Day 11), there are only five days left!

Firstly, I can’t quite understand where the last two weeks have gone. These are meant to be weekly updates but they keep turning into fortnightly ones because the days are escaping me. It felt like it was going to be a really good week/fortnight for running this time, although now I look back I didn’t go nearly as much as I had thought! After running on Sunday, I also went out for two thirty minute runs, one on the Monday and one on the Wednesday. I had planned to go again on Friday, but didn’t. I don’t remember specifically why - but let’s lay the blame on the Olympics.

With the Olympics taking over everything, I thought I’d spare five minutes to note down some thoughts on what I’ve seen so far. These are just scrabbled notes, not arranged in much of an order, Opening Ceremony Highlights Rowan Atkinson’s moment of glory was fabulous. The ability of one man to captivate what turned out to be an audience made up of 26 million is so good. I’m sure there are people that don’t and didn’t like him, but I thought it was perfect. Likewise, giving Tim Berners-Lee centre stage was one of the top moments for me. We watched and commented the opening ceremony over on Sidepodcast which increased the experience ten-fold, and it wasn’t lost on us that without TBL, we wouldn’t have been able to do that. “This is for everyone!” The chimneys! There were plenty of moments where we scratched our heads wondering how it had been done, but the chimneys came out of the ground so smoothly, it was genius to watch. Kenneth Branagh’s slightly smug and proudly happy smile as he watched those Olympic rings being forged - something tells me there wasn’t much acting going on there, and it gave a bit of a warm glow inside. The Queen! HRH gained herself a lot of respect with the James Bond sketch. Lighting the flame. I wasn’t particularly bothered who got to do it, I hadn’t actually realised that was such a big deal. So I wasn’t moved or disappointed when it was the seven youngsters. It was still captivating to watch, and the moment all the individual flames came together to become one giant roaring fire was glorious. Opening Ceremony Lowlights It was quite long! I had to go bed late for the second day in a row, and I am too old for such things! Dizzee Rascal. I know not all of it was going to be to everyone’s tastes, and I’m fine with the vast array of stuff that was on display. I’m even fine with Dizzee getting some air-time, but did it have to be Bonkers? I hate that song so much. The gold armpits on the Team GB suits. Really, really bad. No wonder Stella McCartney distanced herself from them. Although I have my own issues with the team kits that she designed anyway. No Brian May. Or Brian Blessed. Actually, there was a distinct lack of Brians throughout. Days 1-5 Highlights Falling in love with athletes all over again. I tend to forget from one event to the next, but already I’ve become attached to Hannah Miley and Jennifer Pinches. I’m also desperate for Beth Tweddle to win that bars final but part of me is dreading the day actually arriving. That moment you finally win gold. I commented this on Sidepodcast at the time - whilst it must be nice to be like China and the US, racking up medals all the time, there’s something to be said for less is more. That buzz in the office when we found out about our first 2012 gold in the rowing… priceless. The overflowing Twitter feeds. I was just starting to put into place a system where I could catch up with my timeline and not miss anything, but I’ve had to throw that out the window. It’s great though, lots of updates and fab people to follow. So much choice! There is always something to watch, never a dull moment. I spent the entire weekend in front of the TV and could have kept that up all week too. Curses at having to go to work. Princes in the audience. I spotted Princes Wills and Harry in the audience when we got silver in the gymnastics (quickly demoted to bronze) and then silver in the horsey stuff. They are silver lucky for us! Learning about all different kinds of sports and enjoying them with the live comments. If you have any spare time over the next week or so, you should join in. It makes things heaps more interesting and plenty more fun! Days 1-5 Lowlights Finding out hockey is quite such a brutal sport. People keep getting carried off in stretchers and the Team GB women’s captain had to have surgery on her jaw. Now I feel like we got off lightly at school. Not managing to make it through the catch-up stream of the women’s gymnastics team final before they put up a lengthy highlights package on the TV anyway. Not so much from a spoilers point of view, but just because by then it was like… argh, give it up. Watch the highlights. Move on! Not comprehending the road cycling race with it’s peleton that I kept on referring to as a pelican. Still frustrated by it.

There’s just a day or so left before the 2012 Olympics gets underway (or if you’re a football fan, they already have!) and I’m excited! I’ve only really got into the Olympics over the last couple of games, I paid more attention at Beijing than I have before, and I’m really looking forward to watching as much as possible this year. It helps that we’ll have day by day threads on Sidepodcast, so there will always be a place to chatter about what is happening, and it also helps that the BBC’s overload of coverage means you’re unlikely to be able to miss anything. The games being held in this country is a bit tricky, because plenty of people are quite down about the situation (understandably so, traffic, politics, it can all be a nightmare). But I’m excited about the games for what they are - athletes who train religiously for four years from all across the globe coming together to put on a great show. And trying to win a medal or two.

This was recommended to me, actually twice I think, by the Olympics-mad Amy. I added it to my Wish List the first time round, but with the Olympics just around the corner, the second recommendation saw it downloaded onto my Kindle straight away. It’s an invaluable guide to each and every event that the coming sporting extravaganza has to offer, and although it was useful to read and digest, I think its real use will come as a tool to refer to during the Olympic period.

Yesterday, the BBC screened a feature length documentary following the Team GB gymnastics squad as they trained ahead of the 2008 Olympics. It was called “Gymnast”. It started at the very beginning, before the six gymnasts had been chosen, and followed many more hopefuls as they tried to get selected. Hopes and dreams, and all that, it was interesting to see the dynamic between girls, their family, and the coaches. The pressure on those taking exams at the exact same time as the Olympic trials, the worry of those who got injured and whether they would be fit in time.

We all know that when it comes to design, the 2012 Olympics seems to be a big ball of fail. Eh-hem. We’ve had a while to get used to that pink and green disaster, though. The latest addition to the 2012 branding line-up was the mascots. Firstly, I didn’t know there were Olympic mascots anyway. Is this just a host country thing? Why do we need mascots? Secondly, they’re quite scary.

Yesterday, it was announced that Barbara Slater is to take over the Director of BBC Sport role, from Roger Mosey. Slater comes from the Head of Sport Production role, and brings plenty of experience looking after Wimbledon, Golf, the Olympics and the Grand National. Mosey is moving on to be Director of London 2012. The Director of Sport has a lot of challenges ahead, primarily with the intended move from London to the Media City in Salford. There is also the upcoming Winter Olympics, the World Cup, and from this year, the rights to Formula 1.

Apparently I am suddenly interested in lots of different sports. I vaguely remember watching bits of the last Olympics, just because it was on, and I was bored, and I liked TV. This year, I actually seem to care how well we do. This is a weird development for someone who hates sport, and I don’t like it. The BBC page is brilliant, of course, with live video and an automatically updating commentary. However, the medals table doesn’t automatically update. This is an oversight, I think, but then again, it’s not like we win enough medals to make it worth the coding time. Apparently there is a maximum size on the women’s volleyball outfits. And there’s me thinking volleyball was just about pretty ladies running around in next to nothing on a beach. Interesting that we were all blown away by the opening ceremony, and panicking that we would never be able to match it in 2012 (we won’t), but it was all fake. The footage of fireworks was shot on a previous night, and the iconic cute little girl singing was actually voiced by another girl behind the scenes. The best bit of action I’ve seen so far, as described by the BBC Live commentary team: 1537: One of those things on TV that you shouldn’t laugh at but can’t help yourself, a Russian weightlifter failing to make a lift and staggering off the stage with her head in her hands before walking into a wall. As Mel Brooks once said: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”

The Marathon Wrecker - It’s the same guy that ran on the track at the British Grand Prix. Last time they locked him up for trespassing, but this time they can’t really do anything, it was a road, public property. But seriously, the guy should be locked away where he can’t get at anyone.

We went to a country fete today, and it’s very heart-warming to know that people do still leave their houses for things other than football, the pub or shopping. Some parachutists flung themselves out of a plane, and I got a headache from straining my neck towards the sun so long as we watched them descend. There were also Morris Dancers, but let’s not get on to that subject, eh?