It seemed, though, incongruous to me when this went to the top of the charts more than a whole week after the Games had ended.

And by then I was deep in the despair of the disappointed sports fan – at the Seoul Games a competitor I’d been a long-time supporter of, who’d been through years of trials and tribulations and, thanks to boycott and injury, never lifted an Olympic medal, lost her last chance. Suffering an infection, and in truth a little past her prime, she finished way out of the medals in both her events.

Being young, and then having a tendency to put my whole heart and soul into all my fandoms, be they sporting, musical or televisual, I spent most of the rest of 1988 with a broken heart. A Hearts fan at 5.10 pm on 3 May 1986 would have looked cheerful compared to me in October 1988. Worse, I had to carry it largely on my own, as my heroine was foreign so none of the Little Englanders around me understood why she meant so much to me. Only one fellow student at my FE college was sympathetic.

So this song, as much as I like it, is always tinged with sadness of the shattered dreams of Seoul…

“Of all the nauseating pop stars in all of history, Whitney has always, unafailingly, brought me that little bit closer to total raving despair. This cruel hoax has a new twist – it’s this year’s Olympic Anthem., which leaves me no choice but to lob my TV out of the window in case any coverage from Seoul creeps up on me unawares.”

Myers awarded no single of the week. Also reviewed that week;

Siouxsie & The Banshees – The Killing Jar
Dinosaur Jr – Freak Scene
U2 – Desire
The Lilac Time – You’ve Got To Love
Alexander O’Neal – Fake
EPMD – Strictly Business
Talk talk – I Believe In You
Erasure – A Little Respect
Duran Duran – I Don’t Want Your Love
The Wedding Present – Why Are You Being So Reasonable Now?

Btw, I saw this bloke the other day…

I first remember a very young Daley in the mid-seventies appearing on “We Are The Champions”, a kiddies’ sports magazine programme, presented back then by the sainted Ron Pickering. Ron, I think, introduced Thompson as “an Olympic hopeful”. I can’t think what went wrong there.

as for whitney, it’s certainly true that how she sings it is brilliant on its own terms and that she’s got a real discipline and restraint that you don’t normally get in the winners songs, but it’s still pretty painful. in the end it’s kind of the difference between being beaten up by amateurs or professionals.

Erithian. I had no idea that Andy Murray was a Jamaican..

Linford, of course, was indeed born on “The Isle” but has never been anything other than British. The case of Lennox Lewis is a tad more complicated. Having been born in London, he was taken to Canada as a small child, grew up there and won a gold medal in Seoul under the flag of the Maple Leaf before coming back to this country to persue a magnificent professional career under the guise of a freeborn Englishman. The remarkable thing to say about Lennox is that whether he was Canadian or British, he certainly was not an American, which is why he was always so lowly-regarded by blinkered correspondents in the United States. An outragious slight, imho.

Greg Rusedski muddies the waters still further. A Canadian, born to an English mother, he was adopted, so to speak, and enjoyed large support in this country, reaching the final of the US Open in 1997 and subsequently winning SPOTY that year. I saw Greg a couple of weeks ago on court at Eastbourne with Annabel Croft anchoring a Davis Cup tie. And I would gladly be anchored to Annabel any day of the week, I can tell you that for nothing!

A dropped-by-sponsors-because-of-sexual-ambiguity/not-macho-enough, vegan, relatively drug-clean while all round him were juiced to the gills, 9-time gold medal winner across 4 or 5 different Olympics, loses the biggest race of his career to Johnson on the day, but gets the gold after the cheating is exposed.

I dunno, but like Freddie Mercury’s story in pop, you just can’t make up that sort of stuff! It’s a biopic waiting to happen if someone can write a good script.

To me this sounds like most everything Whitney Houston ever released, ie horrible, predictable and totally unloveable.

http://2manykids.com/fitba/Gerd%20Mueller%20-%20Dann%20macht%20es%20bumm.mp3

…one of four singles he released during the best years of his career (1969-74). I think I’ve got one of them in a box somehwere….

“Steve Interesting Davis and his mates get round the old joanna with Chas and Dave for one of the most gruesome singalongs of all time. But where are Alex Higgins, Kirk Stevens and Tony Knowles ? Having more fun with various of the seven deadly sins no doubt !”

Which other unlikely, non-football sports stars have had a stab at pop? I remember liking John Conteh’s The Boxer – from memory it was rumbling, a bit of wah-wah, a little like early Hot Chocolate. Oh, and not the Simon & Garfunkel song.

The chorus had McCulloch go, “Give… me… one…”

To which I’d always think, “…MOMENT IN TIME!”

And its always tickled me, because it’s just when McCull’s forgotten how to be his cool former self, and started trying to do some middle aged post-Liam Gallagher thing- how gutted he’d be to realise he’s doing Whitney.

Was it just me? Yeah, probably. As you were…

Actually, they only care about Track and Field (and Gymnastics) when it’s at the Olympics, it’s not shown on television here any other time. Even when the world champions at various races are Americans they’re unknown back home until they compete in the Olympics. Bit like the Brits with Wimbledon, we don’t give a shit about tennis outside that.

Anything to avoid talking about this record.