I don’t think we can be greatly reassured by the IOC president reiterating his belief that the Olympics will go-ahead.
These were the sort of pronouncements being made this time last year and we know what happened.
They’re basically buying themselves time in the hope that the coronavirus situation improves in Japan and the vaccine roll-out picks up pace, I suspect.
But at least the dreams of thousands of athletes are still alive.
It’s nice when you read about a positive coronavirus Olympic story because there haven’t been many.
And Helen Glover’s is definitely one of those.
Helen won Olympic rowing golds in 2012 and 2016 but had no intention of making a comeback from retirement for Tokyo 2020……until she got back on a rowing machine during the first lockdown.
She’s lucky in one way that her sport lets you do a lot of the fitness and endurance work that’s required on machines that you can keep in your house but it’s one thing keeping yourself fit and another getting yourself into the sort of shape to enable you to compete for gold.
Her selection for Team GB’s rowing squad would be the first for a woman after having children, which would make her a great role model.
If – and fingers crossed it’s when – these Games get the green light there are going to be plenty of tales of athletes for whom a one-year delay has cost them their big chance of going for a medal so let’s hope there will be more like Helen’s to balance the scales.
The European Tour might not be a match for the PGA Tour in terms of stature and prize money but they blow their American rival out of the water on social media, that’s for sure.
The ‘Angry Golfer’ video is the latest in a long line of hilarious ones they’ve brought out. You can certainly see why one tour (and Ryder Cup team) is renowned for its camaraderie and the other is the exact opposite.
The timing couldn’t have been better because one of the angry golfers who took the mickey out of himself brilliantly went and won the tournament a few days later, Tyrrell Hatton.
I’ll never be too critical of someone who crosses a line when they lose their temper in their early years as a professional. I’ve done it myself on the biggest stage of them all, the Olympics!
You have to learn how to keep a lid on it – for your own best interests as much as anything else – but all the top athletes really struggle with mistakes they make otherwise they wouldn’t have got as far in their careers as they have.
Some people might get help from sports psychologists but, for me, it really is as basic as counting to 10 sometimes!
Myself and my mixed doubles partner Bobby Lammie had a nice tournament win this week.
We finished top of the British Curling League, a triple round-robin format between eight teams that started way back in August.
Anytime you win a long-running competition like that you know you’ve deserved it because, a bit like in football leagues, it comes down to consistency.
I definitely feel we’re developing really well as a team and we’ll be looking to back this win up when there’s another mixed event the week after next.
Before that, though, all the Team Muirhead girls are back together for an in-house competition that has been organised for what would have been Scottish Championship week.
