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Bring On The Racing Tortoises
KEYWORDS: sport, swimming, television, humour, humor, satire


Television sport producers seem to be obsessed with showing interminable swimming championships. Are there any slower sports than swimming that they might offer us. Ian Thorpe for Boggart Blog speculates on one.

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Bring On The Racing Tortoises.
by Ian R Thorpe
first posted at Boggart Blog, 2006-03-21

Anyone who reads me regularly will probably have gathered that I am not the world's greatest morning person. Early to bed, early to rise makes a man boring as spinach in my view. So it will be no surprise that over the last few days I have whiled away a portion of the morning, in between watching Penny Smith read the news on TVAM (one can never watch Penny Smith read the news enough times - that woman does not know how not to flirt) by switching to the Beeb to see if I could catch any running, cycling or rowing, all sports of which I approve.

Do you ever wonder as I do why, when one of the sporting things is on, why there seems to be ten times as much broadcast time devoted to swimming as to all the other sports put together.

I'll tell you why. Because even a short swimming race can take up to six weeks to complete. Humans are not built to go through water so a swimming race consists of people splashing around frantically and not getting anywhere. I always want to shout "get out and run along the side of the pool, its much quicker."

Even the shortest race distance takes forever. The runners can do a hundred meters in ten seconds, blink and you miss it. When a swimming race is on you have time to have a bath, drink a cup of coffee, listen to all your old vinyl albums and take a bargain break with Easy Jet before they even get halfway.

The fastest swimming stroke is called the crawl. That tells you everything really.

In spite of the Murray-Wankeresque histrionics of the commentators and you have to say in old Murray's defence that at least racing cars are going somewhere except when they're not, swimming is just not an exciting spectacle. This morning I was unlucky enough to catch the end of the men's fifteen hundred meters freestyle. Freestyle means you are allowed to do crawl but if you are really dedicated to the spirit of the sport you can choose a slower stroke. The race was won by The Ancient Of Days; he was the only one to finish, only eternal beings live long enough to swim fifteen hundred meters.

I think they should drop swimming from the schedule of these championships and introduce something more entertaining, like Tortoise racing.

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