Merci bien, Paris, you've saved the Olympic Games

Thrilling race finishes, big rivalries, inspirational stories and vivacious hosts

Cole Hocker of Team USA celebrates winning the gold medal after the men's 1500m final at the Paris Olympics. (Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)

As everyone who loves athletics and therefore loves the Olympics knows, the greatest race of all time took place in 1971 in Helsinki. It featured David Bedford, the Brit resembling a lefty lecturer at a red-brick uni. If you only know Bedford from the send-up impersonation in those 118 118 commercials - he fought over stolen image rights and won - then find that 10,000m final on YouTube. I replay it often, and am still astonished and thrilled by how it concluded.

Rather than the Olympics this was the European Championships but it’s how I judge any race of any kind for excitement and the awe reserved for athletes who push themselves to the ultimate, and then beyond. Bedford was the world record-holder, a man who went out hard early and killed the field with monotonous pounding. Finland had lost its reputation for great long-distance running but, ever hopeful, the country’s journalists wanted to know what Bedford made of their latest prospect - a primary teacher by profession, slightly balding and looking older than 30. “Who’s Juha Vaatainen?” he asked, which became the next day’s headline.

In the race, Bedford’s pounding couldn’t shake off Vaatainen and at the bell the Finn blurred right past him. East Germany’s Jurgen Haase tried to go with Vaatainen, tried twice to overtake in an outrageous sprint duel. It was insane, it seemed superhuman. No one who’d already been running for almost half an hour ever did this. Vaatainen won, urged on by a home crowd chucking programmes high into the air. “They’re going absolutely berserk!” shrieked David Coleman in a commentary which was surely the inspiration for the Spitting Image puppet with the exploding head.

Noah Lyles of Team USA crosses the finish line to win gold during the men's 100m final at the Paris Olympics. (Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

So to these wonderful Olympics. Paris may not have produced a “Dylan goes electric” moment like Vaatainen in Helsinki, but regarding white-hot finishes, has there ever been a men’s 100m final where almost the entire field surges simultaneously for the line? This one made us gasp but there was also a comedic element. Remember the scene in Airplane! where in their rush to be first with the story the journalists charged at a bank of payphones, hitting them at exactly the same moment and so causing the booths to crash to the ground? (Obviously hacks running as fast as elite sprinters renders the comparison somewhat far-fetched).

Then there was the 1500m. Another flabbergasting climax but different: the Hocker shocker. Cole Hocker, coming from nowhere, looks-wise maybe via Prof Bedford’s campus, certainly somewhere it’s polite to remember to “thank God”, and leaving defending champ Jakob Ingebrigsten and Josh Kerr, from Portobello, with their running shorts figuratively drooping at the ankles.

The rivalry between these two belonged to a different

era: a kind of pre-media training wild west with lots of trash-talking, although back then the term wasn’t used. It provided great copy - Kerr’s gold spikes, Ingebrigsten releasing a pop song translated from the Norwegian as “Nobody does it better” - but difficult not to think this amounted to an echo of the “Who’s Juha Vaatainen?” question. Ingebrigsten was so obsessed with Kerr, moving out wide to force the latter wider, that Hocker could dart through the gap - a move the Scot can’t have anticipated either. Ultimately Hocker did it better, and 24 hours later in the 400m, another American, Quincy Hall, would snatch gold on the line from another Team GB-er, Matt Hudson-Smith. Again a stupendous finish.

The needle between Kerr and Ingebrigsten brought back middle-distance memories of when Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett tailed each other round the globe trumping records, and then come Christmas neglected to send cards. I thought the BBC was going to tut-tut about the current rivalry in the usual prim manner until the always terrific Michael Johnson insisted, no, it was good for the sport, good for the Olympics.

Overall, the Beeb has had a fine Games. Early quibbles about the Corporation not being able to show everything quickly disappeared. It showed all the stuff that mattered. What a joy, after so many football bores, to hear different voices, eg, the commentator for the bouldering, whose name I regrettably didn’t catch. Maybe this man drags a boulder across a cave entrance the rest of the time but once every four years he has his moment. And these are the Olympics where I’ve learned to love Clare Balding, not least for blubbing at confirmation of Andy Murray’s farewell, an entirely apt response.

These are the Olympics which have probably saved the movement. There was a sense some were falling out of love with the Games even before Tokyo played out behind masks with no crowds. Because of the quadrennial cycle, the Olympics are the last big sporting event to emerge from the pandemic. They needed vivacious hosts and found them. They needed inspirational stories, uplifting sportsmanship, occasional madness and - admit it - beautiful bodies to renew our admiration for 5am alarm-calls, missed parties and other sacrifices and the Olympics found all of that too.

Best bits? So many. Duncan Scott, Keely Hodgkinson, Gabbi Thomas (be still my beating heart). Simone Biles and the first all-black gymnastics podium. The big clanking bell, the North/South Korea selfie, the cool, other-hand-in-pocket nonchalance of Turkish pistoleer Yusuf Dikec. World-record pole vaulter Armand Duplantis’ celebrating with a hug for his model girlfriend, a pretend punch-up with his best mate and some Dikec mimicry. Anthony Ammirati’s own pole getting in the way but winning him the offer of a porn contract. Un-British barging winning us the mountain biking. France’s Death Race 2000 tribute-act scooping BMX gold, silver and bronze. The 61-year-old table tennis player, the 51-year-old skateboarder, all the competitors in specs. Kitesurfing! Trap shooting! But hang on, what’s golf? Ach, I’ll find out next time.