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Rhona Martin

The Mrs Mop of the Winter Olympics (it’s being so cheerful as keeps her going) is honoured with an entry very little for herself, and even less as a representative of a peculiarly nonsensical ‘sport’. Primarily Rhona is honoured here as the catalyst for despair and self-disgust induced by her finest hour.

She seems a dour sort, to be truthful, does the captain of the Great Britain squad that won gold in Utah in 2002, and the doleful sheepdog haircut has its part to play there. But wouldn’t you be miserable if you devoted your waking life to such a vocation? Many Olympic minority events are lent charm by their nihilistic pointlessness, and those of us afflicted with the obsessive interest in numbers and rankings that almost defines the Aspergers end of the spautistic spectrum can pass untold hours fascinated by the scoring systems of diving, archery, showjumping and even weightlifting.

Curling, on the other hand, is what that late and deeply lamented comic giantess Linda Smith wisely identified as ‘housework on ice’. What it says about this country that millions of us were driven to emotional involvement in Martin’s triumph is too obvious to say at all. But we’ll say it anyway. What a preposterous sporting land this must be when the endeavours of four slow-skating charladies buffing up a sheet of ice for no apparent purpose is the cause of feverish national excitement.

This outbreak of proxy Henmania – the succumbing of otherwise normal people to patriotic impulses that overwhelm all rationale to cause more revulsion than pleasure – was as fierce as any in modern history. To care desperately, even for a few hours, about which stone has been ice-buffed to which part of ‘the house’ (the scoring section) was a shaming experience, and hers as depressing a gold medal as was ever placed around the neck of a Scottish housekeeper misrouted from overseeing the polishing of baronial floors to standing on a podium, moist-eyed, making a choral request to the Lord for the survival of our Queen. Shame on you, Rhona Martin, and infinitely more shame on us for watching you.