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FROSTY’S RAMBLINGS Jumping more than my own height

PETER FROST, like most of the nation, has been watching the Tokyo Olympics

MORE than six decades ago this humble scribe had his own ambitions to win a medal in the Olympics. 

I was about 12 when I won the Middlesex schools high jump championship. I was about five feet six-and-a-half inches (you can do your own metric conversion if you must) and I cleared the pole at five feet seven.

It was an impressive figure, and far higher than any other boy at the stadium that day. 

However, I wasn’t actually the highest jumper on the field. That honour went to a girl (we called them girls then).

Frances Slaap pictured before leaving London to represent Great Britain in the Olympic Games in Rome
Frances Slaap pictured before leaving London to represent Great Britain in the Olympic Games in Rome

She was from Ruislip, not far from my home in Harlesden. Her name was Frances Slaap. She was four or five years older than me and Frances would eventually go on to jump for Britain in the 1960 Rome and the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. She competed not just in high jump but also in hurdles.

I jumped with the Queen’s Park Harriers, she with the Ruislip and Northwood Athletic Club. At this time high jump was going through radical change.

At school most jumped the upright scissors style where you usually landed standing up. Serious jumpers however did the western roll, invented in the US in 1912. 

It remained the predominate style until the straddle took over in the mid-1950s but this was soon replaced by the Fosbury flop, first used by Dick Fosbury in the 1968 Mexico Olympics and still the most popular style today. 

So I watched this year’s Olympics with some interest. It was great to see the many new, sometimes called street, sports like skateboarding and BMX bike racing, as well as speed climbing, surfing and karate. 

It was also great to see traditional Olympians like gold medal-winning gymnast Max Whitlock enthusiastically welcoming these new events. 

I couldn’t help contrasting our well-financed posh boy and public school-based rowing teams who got precisely no gold medals at all and just a tiny handful of silver and bronze with the numerous medals working-class athletes won in the newer events. 

Half a century ago my wife Ann and I had a holiday on a hire boat on the Thames. One morning we rounded a corner somewhere near Slough to find the river totally covered with small rowing boats going in all directions.

A smart man in a blazer approached in his umpire launch and using his megaphone told us: “Don’t worry about the boys, drive straight through them, they’ll get out of the way.” 

“What’s going on?” I asked. “They are the new boys at Eton and we get them all out on the water once a week,” he answered in his cut-glass accent.  

No wonder expensive public school pupils go on to be most of the rowers in Britain’s Olympic team — yes, the one that got so few medals in Tokyo. 

Lauren Price (in blue) competing in the Commonwealth Games
Lauren Price (in blue) competing in the Commonwealth Games

One competitor who demonstrates this class-based difference better than most is Welsh lightweight boxer Lauren Price.

She won the heart of TV audiences when interviewed by the man third in line to be king. 

Prince William is just waiting till his granny and his dad kick the jewel-encrusted Faberge bucket before he gets the top job. Until then he doesn’t have to have a real job but he does live like er … a king.

Price, on the other hand, has achieved a fair few things in sports. She won 52 caps for Wales in football, she was world champion in kickboxing and she also competed in taekwondo, often at the same time. 

She was the first Welsh female boxer to even compete in an Olympic Games and on her first attempt she won a gold medal. 

But, as Prince William reminded us, in order to do this she still has to drive a night-time cab in her home town, Newport, south Wales.

Near my own home in Northampton, in the depression-hit ex-steel town of Corby, a heroic woman, Mandy Young, fought hard to raise the money to set up an indoor skateboard and BMX bike training course. She called it Adrenalin Alley.

Young first got the idea to start an urban sports centre when her son John, who struggled through his childhood with an undiagnosed brain tumour, found his passion in skateboarding.

When John was viciously attacked one night, Young and her family chose to find something positive in the horrific experience. 

John died in 2001 and mum Mandy established the Corby Wheels Project in 2002. 

She found a redundant poultry factory and once the chicken shit and feathers had been cleared away probably the best skateboard and BMX facility in Britain emerged. 

It wasn’t easy — in fact it was as recently as last year the alley was on the brink of closure due to lack of funding and income caused by the lockdown.

Many of our new street sport medallists learnt the skills they took to the Tokyo Olympics in far from glamorous Corby. 

Among the medallists who trained in this world-class facility are Charlotte Worthington and Declan Brooks. 

Declan took a bronze in an indoor BMX event and Charlotte Worthington clinched the gold, also on her BMX bike. 

She was the first woman ever to do the spectacular black-flip in competition. 

Worthington and Brooks reminded me that if Corby was a nation it would be 38th out of the 206 countries at the Olympics.

Popular BBC pundit Alex Scott
Popular BBC pundit Alex Scott

Finally, if anyone needed more evidence of the class basis of British sports organisation and funding, they only needed to listen to buffoon Lord Digby Jones taking a pop at BBC commentator Alex Scott. 

Jones started his career advising Labour prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from his seat at the head of the Tory based Confederation of British Industry. 

Here are his considered views on trade unions spoken in 2006: “They are in danger of withering on the vine of irrelevance. They are backward-looking and not on today’s agenda. 

“The trade unions put their members first and not the country. Labour is always in thrall to the unions.” 

Sounds to me like just the man to be advising Labour prime ministers. 

He had a pop at Jeremy Corbyn too, branding his decision to march with anti-Trump protesters in London as “absolutely disgusting.”

Now he suggests that Scott, along with other BBC presenters, have accents that are too working class. What a bloody cheek!

It is well known that Digby-Jones lobbied various broadcasting authorities to get a job on the telly. 

He fancied himself like Sir Alan Sugar on the Apprentice, or on the panel of Dragons’ Den, maybe even rivalling Mary Portas as The Queen of Shops.
 
He failed miserably. Nobody thought he had either the talent, charisma or anything else except trotting out his predictable old right-wing ideas. He had of course never run a business.  

Now, it seems Lord Digby is working out his TV jealousy on people with real talent like Alex Scott.

There is no doubt that Scott really earned her place in the BBC’s Tokyo team. She is knowledgeable and entertaining and speaks clearly. 

Scott gained her expertise making 140 appearances for the England women’s national football team and represented Great Britain at the 2012 Summer Olympics. 

Nor can we forget to mention her several years as a columnist for this newspaper. Perhaps it was this that really upset his lordship.

There is a lot more to say about the Tokyo Games but I will leave that to sports writers better qualified than Frosty, including, of course, Alex Scott. 

No elocution lessons please, Alex, I would hate you to sound just like all those pompous prats on Westminster’s Tory benches and in the House of Lords.

Fascist origins of the Olympics        

FOUNDER of the modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin was a French aristocrat with many reactionary ideas. He believed that all sport should be amateur. 

This he explained would keep out working people and leave it to those aristocrats rich enough to enjoy it. 

He also described women’s sports as “impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic, and we are not afraid to add: incorrect.”

The baron was president of the International Olympic Committee from 1896 to 1925. He died in 1937, having seen the Berlin Games fulfil his dream of a right-wing militaristic Olympics. 

Hitler tried to exclude any Jewish athletes from the 1936 Games and was horrified when African-American sprinter Jesse Owens thrashed his master race Aryan athletes. 

From its foundation, the IOC has always been a law unto itself, accountable to no-one. It makes its own laws, behaves like an autonomous, untouchable nation state. 

The only impediment to its global power are the deep layers of corruption at every level throughout the organisation.

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