Published: 1 August, 2013
by RICHARD OSLEY

THE roads were quiet on Tuesday night. The streets deserted. The pubs thought about locking up early. EastEnders hit an all-time viewers low. You could hear a pin drop in anticipation.

All understandable: the world swimming championships was on BBC2 and – remember! – we all love swimming, and rowing, and athletics.

All of us. More than brown paper packages tied up with string.

Those sports are so much more inspiring than the gluttonous, overpaid world of football, we all told ourselves during the London Olympics, as we walked around with a self-satisfied glow.

If you saved all of the athletes-are-better-role-models-than-Premiership-footballers opinion pieces in the national press from last year and have an average-ish reading speed, then you should be finished some time early next year.

You see, 12 months ago we were all experts in freestyle medleys and coxless fours. For three weeks in our collective history there was nothing else anybody wanted to do more in the world – or at least nothing we were allowed to say we wanted to do more – than watch Clare Balding and co guide us through a
200-metre butterfly race.

We raved on and on and on about how brilliant we were at doing the Olympics.

And, apart from the ticketing fiasco, we were brilliant at doing the Olympics.

We showed that if you spend huge amounts of money on the London Games, you get a mesmerising spectacle in return, a festival of brilliance capable of convincing us that we do actually love watching swimming more than football.

The sobering reality is that most of us don’t, and apart from those three weeks, football triumphs whether we like it or not. It may be a nasty fact of life – rather depressing, yes – but it’s true. Like incurable, drugged sleepwalkers, the majority zombify around football.

You’d have to spend Olympic-size cheques every year to convince people to watch things like swimming more than once every four years.

Same with rowing. How much rowing have you watched since crying on your sofa over our gold medals at London 2012? It’s been on Eurosport, you didn’t feel the need to subscribe, right?

Even the amazing feats of our Olympic athletes has not led to a real, deep, hankering for watching the sport with the same regularity as overpaid footballers.

Even in the week of the Anniversary Games, have a look at the back pages of the newspapers, a good indication of where public interest is centred.

You will find that even though Jessica Ennis-Hill and Mo Farah AND THE REST may have captured our hearts for a glorious summer, still, after all that Olympic investment, after the biggest PR job athletics and swimming could have possibly enjoyed, people are more interested in pictures of Gareth Bale at airports.

Similarly Chris Froome has managed to slip away from winning the Tour de France with about as much excitement as if he’d won a donkey race on Blackpool beach.

This isn’t just a north London mindset. In Manchester they are thinking about Fabregas. In Liverpool they are sweating on Suarez.

Even when football is in its off-season the sport is able to eclipse long jumpers and pole vaulters, with grotesque stories of millions and millions of pounds being spent on football teams.

The “it’s too early for the football season” complaints come earlier every year but deep down, as much as we may hate it, it conquers all. Don’t fool yourselves, it really does.