The winter Olympics draw to a close, and the world hits the channel-changer, uninterested, unaware, unwatching. For the great myth of all these great sporting contests is that they bring people around the world together in divine moments of global friendship focused on athletic prowess; and it is all rubbish. Little or no mutual respect results from sport, not least because the great sporting occasions of the world are in fact used as vast mirrors for narcissistic preening. We see and register very little that is not our own: and the success of that which is our own is magnified to a ludicrous and all-occluding degree.
Who anywhere outside Ireland remembers who won the 1987 Tour de France? Who remembers who won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1983 or the International Snooker Championship the same year? Outside the lunatic ranks of the professional sports quiz fanatics, who remembers who won anything in anything, apart from events in which their compatriots, or teams in which they had a particular interest, competed?
European Cup
Most soccer fans in Britain or in Ireland can tell you who won the European Cup in 1967 and 1968 because the winners were Celtic FC and Manchester United - both teams which exert a curiously British-Irish fascination. I have absolutely no idea who won the European Cup in 1970, or indeed in any of the years that followed. Yet for each of those years, the supporters of the winning clubs not merely were in transports of joy at their success, but were also convinced the world was recording that success as truly memorable and truly deserved.
It is simply untrue. All we remember from these occasions is what pleases our own vanity. That which pleases others' vanity and gives them enormous pride, passes us by completely; yet the success of the great sports con-job depends on the delusion that the rest of the world cares.
I do not know, and I never will know, who won the five-man downhill slalom bob freestyle curling. I have spent the week utterly unaware of the identity of the 200-km Nordic swim through pack-ice and polar bears. To my dying day, I will not hear the name of the winner of the women's uphill iceberg towing competition. Whoever it was who won the one women's igloo-tossing gold medal will remain anonymous to me, even unto the last crack of the last pane of arctic ice.
My ignorance is complete, invincible. It would distress me were I to be told that Fitte Thrlicksdttir had won the women's 10-kilometre ice bellyslide, or that Thor Ugmundsonn was the Olympic champion in the Nordic Pole Vault. I do not wish to know that. Kindly leave the stage.
Burning bonfires
But in the countries from which those people come, they were burning bonfires through the night, believing they had been visited by world greatness. They had not, of course. They had merely seen themselves reflected in the mirror of a world event, and were accordingly delirious.
The truth is: nobody else noticed. Nobody ever does, outside the blue-riband events like the 100 metres and the 1500 metres. We might remember Michelle Smith's three gold medals - but they know nothing of them in Germany, they ring no bells in the memory of all those glum Nordic folk glued to their television screens as Ulf and Ingrid complete their arctic synchronised frostbite voluntary.
We fill our years with international sports contests and we convince ourselves that, whenever our contestants compete, the matter is of world importance. It is not, of course. American television shows only sports events in which Americans are competing. We tend to be more generous in our vision; if we were not, we would see international sport every halfcentury or so. But when an Irish athlete wins at the Olympics, you can be sure that the US is not watching, largely because an American is winning something else, somewhere else.
Americans want to see Americans win. Icelandics want to see Ug Lugmunnson win. Danes want to see Christian Christiansonn win. Poles want to see Janusz Dabrowski win. We want to see Sean O'Sullivan win; and we will be utterly unware when he does that the only people paying any attention to his triumph will be us. In Reykjavik they are celebrating Vigdis Kevinsdottir's silver medal in the downhill walrusharpooning handicap.
We choose our areas of interest, limited by event and by our own representatives, and in our minds transform that narrow arena into a world spectacle. It is not. It is merely our own parochial vanity being given a world forum for expression. And nobody else notices.
Cyclists and scenery
No doubt we are convinced that the world will suddenly take Ireland seriously this summer when the Tour de France for a weekend becomes the Tour d'Irlande. I doubt if anyone will notice. Who remembers which part of France the cyclists are in? Nobody is really all that struck by the scenery; nobody thinks because of the fields they glimpse on television as grimacing cyclists go by, "My, I'm going to scrap my holiday plans in Thailand, the Vendee's the place for me."
But I can't help wondering if we've been sold a pup anyway. The Tour de France's weekend in Ireland is the weekend of the World Cup Final in Paris. Nobody in the world will be paying any attention to a few dozen cyclists grunting in the hills around Blessington. For that weekend anyway, soccer will be the biggest sport in the world and nobody will give a hoot who gets the violet jersey at the end of the Sally Gap run.
And by the end of the summer, nobody will have the least idea who was the losing World Cup Finalist, and only the countries from which they come will remember the unsuccessful heroics of the also-rans of the early rounds. Sport is not an ambassador for peace; it is merely an opportunity for vanity.