Sport & Fitness

After all the frivolity this summer at Wimbledon and the World Cup, it’s time to get down to some serious sport on Thursday night. Elegant Bedford Square is the setting for The Chap & Hendrick’s Olympics, featuring such hotly contested events as the Hop, Skip and G&T and the Pipe Smokers’ Relay. Not forgetting the Three-Trousered Limbo, in which pairs of contestants sharing enormous pants wriggle under a steadily lowered pole to the sound of calypso music played on the gramophone; underwear revelation frowned upon. Feature continues

This is the second year that Hendrick’s Gin has joined The Chap, the self-styled ‘Journal for the Modern Gentleman’, to stage this evening of silliness for the immaculate of trouser. Neither athleticism nor state-of-the-art sportswear are required as the prizes – gold, silver and bronze cravats – are awarded purely for panache, savoir-faire and amusing headgear.

After the Olympic Pipe has been lit and the National Anthem played by a brass band, the participants will flex their cocktail-shaking wrist muscles in a languid parade around the field. Then comes the first event, the Martini Knockout Relay, with the teams handicapped by the fact that their drinks are usually mixed by a butler. All stuff and nonsense, of course, and good-humoured mockery of the age of the dilettante; an echo of effortless Edwardian amateurism.

Parodies they may be, but games not too far removed from these have been a feature of British life for centuries. For example, folk festivals in the Tudor and Stuart period reveal the origins of barrel walking, Aunt Sally (throwing a truncheon-shaped stick or ‘dolly’ underarm at a suspended target) and Tip Cat (the ‘cat’ being a stubby six-inch object tapered at each end and placed on a flat surface. A bat is used to tap it airborne and, as it rises, it’s hit again as far as possible). You’ll find them all still played somewhere.

The daddy of them all, though, is the Cotswold Olimpicks, held each June on a hill outside Chipping Campden. By a remarkable coincidence, London 2012 will mark the 400th anniversary of this annual fair, devised by Robert Dover to honour the ancient Games of Greece and revived in 1951. Among the sports that have endured across four centuries are ‘jumping in sacks’, throwing the sledgehammer, spurning the barre (like tossing the caber) and, best of all, shin-kicking. Contestants hold each other by the shoulders and try to bring their opponent to the ground by hacking his shins.

A match is presided over by a ‘stickler’, kickers wear traditional white smocks and are allowed to protect their shins only with straw.
Both the Cotswold Olimpicks and The Chap & Hendrick’s quixotic contemporary version serve to remind us that the word ‘sport’ is a contraction of the verb ‘to disport’, meaning ‘to divert, amuse; to move in gaiety’. The sport we watch now, in contrast, is humourless and depressingly dominated by hype, gripes and swipes. After four weeks of football besmirched by Cristiano Ronaldo and his diving, cheating chums, it’s difficult not to take pleasure in the arch but innocent japes planned for Bedford Square. Anyone for the Cucumber Sandwich Discus?

The Chap & Hendrick’s Olympics are on Thur. See listings for details. Cotswold Olimpicks: www.olimpickgames.co.uk.