At the same time as athletes from around the world are taking part in the London Olympics, millions of Britons will be indulging in popular summer sports that you won’t see at the Games. Cheese-rolling, caber-tossing, bowls, golf and cricket have little in common except for their origins in Britain’s parks and village greens — and the fact that they are excluded from Olympian glory. On a typical rainy British summer afternoon members of the Finchley Bowls Club in north London emerge from the clubhouse, around five miles from the park where the Olympic Games will be held. “We play in all weathers, including rain,” says Ron Raymond, the club president. “We play if there’s a cloudburst. We only stop if the grass is waterlogged, and that’s because we don’t want to damage the green.”
Just down the road in this leafy enclave, which former premier Margaret Thatcher once represented in parliament, is the Finchley Cricket Club. Finchley Golf Club is a similar distance in the other direction. Bowls, cricket and golf are just three of a wide array of non-Olympic sports that are popular here. In London there are more than a dozen places for playing croquet — the deceptively genteel but in reality viciously competitive game in which players knock balls through hoops with a mallet. Then there’s polo, which also involves hitting a ball with a mallet, except on horseback. The rules of the game and its original headquarters in Britain, where it was imported from India, were in Hurlingham, southwest London.
Across town from Hurlingham is Lord’s, the spiritual home of cricket. On a summer weekend in most English country villages, the type with thatched cottages and with handpumped ale in the pub, the thwack of leather on willow from a cricket match can be heard somewhere nearby. Cricket last made a brief Olympic appearance 112 years ago — and the closest it will get in 2012 is when Lord’s hosts the Olympic archery competition. Earlier this year the International Cricket Council, the sport’s world governing body, said it was considering a bid to have cricket’s shorter Twenty20 form return to the Olympics. “We have never had a format that would lend itself to playing in the Olympics until Twenty20 came to the fore,” ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat said.
The ICC was officially recognised as a federation by the International Olympic Committee in 2010, meaning the ICC can bid to join the 2020 Games. Bowls, meanwhile, is played at the Commonwealth Games, where Rob Weale of Wales and Natalie Melmore of England won the men’s and women’s singles titles respectively in New Delhi in 2010.
Rogge – the IOC’s ‘Mr Normal’
Jacques Rogge enters his final Olympic Games as president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) having firmly imposed his ‘Mr Normal’ image on the movement. The 70-year-old Belgian has adopted the same precision he learnt when he qualified as an orthopaedic surgeon in removing the extravagances of the previous era under Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch, who he replaced when the former Franco era diplomat stepped down in 2001. While there is nothing flamboyant about the bookish, quietly-spoken and cultivated Belgian – his look has been compared to Grandpa in the classic American TV comedy series ‘The Munsters’ – he was the natural choice to replace Samaranch at the election in Moscow in 2001. Coming in the wake of the Salt Lake City ‘votes for gifts’ scandal which had rocked the movement and seen several members expelled – the hosting of those Winter Games was rescued by now Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney – the IOC was in desperate need of a pair of safe and clean hands. Thus it was that Rogge polled higher than Canadian lawyer Dick Pound and the scandal-tainted Kim Un-Yong who had received a serious warning in the fall out of the Salt Lake City scandal.
