RIGHT NOW the Winter Olympics are being shown wall to wall on the BBC… and being an Olympic junkie I find myself watching events I have never shown any interest in before, for which I do not know the rules and which I will never participate in for the good reason that I am not actually insane.
The ice racing looks absolutely lethal but consider the major down hill skiing events. They are on courses so slippery and steep that even if you fall over en route you still cover four kilometres in under two minutes. Failing those, there’s the gruelling event involving travelling great distances on skis uphill and down dale with a gun on your back and shooting at barely visible targets along the way.
YOU CAN TRY snow-boarding at several million miles an hour with other people up close and personal and heading for the same narrow gates so they can beat each other to the finish line in the valley far below. Too risky? Then try curling, which is bowls on ice using 20kg blocks of granite and brushes to keep them moving. Whatever, it’s colourful, full of bite-size moments, highly charged and emotional and absolutely riveting… in short, the perfect displacement activity for writers of fantasy like me who spend time in virtual worlds we’ll never reach doing heroic things via our characters which require great skill and leadership while zapping the evil opposition.
Even if you’re not into these kinds of sport it’s worth turning on one of the broadcasts this year for the credit sequence. It’s stunning, slightly sinister and incredibly clever visually, showing an anonymous comic-book hero getting from A to B using all the different sports on the way and destroying The Evil One before winning the gold. I guess it’s more or less monochrome because these days, as my images show, Olympians dress like super heroes to such an extent that they are barely identifiable as real people. So the credit sequence can only differentiate itself from the ‘real’ thing by going black and white.
It took me a while to find the link where you can see the whole sequence without the overlay of BBC stuff so to save you the trouble here it is: http://campaignlive.co.uk/theWork/news/979791/gallery/6665/page/2/#6665 Enjoy! Pure fantasy!