Tortured by the buzzers and blurrers

THE FINAL WORD

Three years ago, before the World Athletics Championships in Stuttgart, a press conference with the legendary sprinter Carl Lewis was punctuated by apparently inexplicable outbursts of mirth from a group of reporters.

It transpired that a sweepstake had been set up by the British contingent over the number of times the bemedalled American would mention the buzz word "focused". As the running total approached and then surpassed each estimate, the atmosphere became one of barely suppressed hilarity. The count stopped, I think, at 27.

Lewis's manager, Joe Douglas, saw the funny side of it. "You English guys," he said with a grin, "You kill me!" Lewis seemed less amused.

There are some who would characterise such mockery as childish. True, true. But sport, at the top level, is getting too solemn for its own and anyone else's good. And anything - well almost anything - which militates against this tendency should be seen as a Good Thing.

Perhaps, though, the fault lies not in the stars, but in ourselves - for asking dull questions and encouraging dull answers. Press conferences, certainly, can provoke instances of po-faced behaviour from either side of the floor.

A personal favourite is the question put to the triple-jump bronze medallist at last year's World Athletics Championships, as a roomful of journalists strained at their collective leash to talk with Britain's gold medallist Jonathan Edwards. Jerome Romain, of the Dominican Republic, was asked about his country's economy. He went on to give a halting, but detailed, reply.

For the reporter of athletics, that peculiarly self-obsessive sport, there are two areas of enquiry which must be approached with extreme caution. They are: injuries and psychological preparation.

Asking an athlete about an injury is like trying to clear a blocked sink. You soon have more on your hands than you either wanted or expected.

Inevitably, the painful toe or twinged calf muscle in question will prove to be merely a symptom of some deeper ill, referred through hamstring, hip, back, arm, shoulder, nose, ears, teeth...

Elite competitors live and train close to the edge of what is possible for the human frame; so they develop elite injuries. Athletes like to talk about "listening to their body." It must be an awful din sometimes.

And that phrase, with all its dubious, quasi-mystical resonance, brings us on to the second vexed area. Psychological preparation, like physical fitness, is clearly an integral requirement for any serious sporting competitor. But Lord, how some people do go on.

The advent of "visualisation" has changed forever the nature of the sporting interview. I can remember spending a good half an hour nine years ago discussing this very subject with Watford's centre-forward. Perhaps there was more to Mark Falco's game than met the eye.

Now it's all very well if you are Sally Gunnell to visualise - as she did before winning the 1993 world 400m hurdles title - every variation of challenge and how you will deal with it. But what, usefully, can you do if you are not a Gunnell, and never will be? Do you visualise, perhaps, hanging on for 300 metres and then dying a death? Or sprouting wings? Or what?

There are moments amid all this tortured analysis when one longs for more of the kind of attitude displayed by Curtis Robb, the medical student and 800 metres runner, after he had qualified for the 1992 Olympics by winning at the AAA Championships.

"I gave it some stick in the back straight," he said, in his lilting Liverpudlian accent. "I had to go, really. I didn't want to watch the Olympics on TV."

Not a mention of "focused." For which, much thanks.