HOWZAT

But this lack of ease with the subject will not stop the world, male and female both, from watching the swimming that dominates the first week of every Games. The swimming events are contested by people as near naked as dammit, with bodies of a subtle and refined perfection. Yet swimming is not outrageously sexy in any obvious way. Unlike gymnastics, there is no sense in which swimmers are there to put on a show.

No: they are there to swim faster than they have ever swum in their lives, and the muscles beneath their shaved skins have been polished and honed for that reason alone. They transform themselves into amphibians with their froggy-goggles, pull a sort of condom on to their heads to save an infinitesimal fragment of water resistance, and concentrate all their beings not on pleasing the billion viewers with their beauty but in getting to the end of the pool before everybody else.

Swimmers lack the head-turning, muscle-popping physique of the sprinters on the track, and are the more pleasing because of this. The bodies, of both sexes, are sleekly purposeful. Their thrilling, near-naked perfection is wonderful, yet the swimmers have no thought of it in those tense seconds before the start. The unselfconscious nature of this physical beauty is, in itself, not without a whiff of Tabasco.

There is something repellent about deliberate and cultivated physical beauty, whether of the pouting female kind or the preening male kind. Women tend to despise men who are obsessed with their own bodies, and to dislike cosmetic, gym-fostered musculature — but the incidental beauty of the swimmers is a different thing entirely. If you seek the same kind of uninterested beauty in Athens, then go to the National Archaeological Museum and gaze on the statute of Poseidon.

There is a sense in which images of male perfection have been hijacked by gay culture. The Renaissance ideal of physical beauty has been replaced by an altogether more calculating kind of self-display. But in sport — at least in the action of sport — we can escape this, for when the gun goes an athlete loses all selfconsciousness in the pursuit of his goal. And that is far more wonderful, and far more thrilling, than any kind of posing.

The second week is dominated by the track and field, and by Lycra, gold chains and lip-gloss. Athletes of both sexes like to look good: but they look their best when the action begins. I recall the women’s pole vault at the Sydney Games. I was supposed to be watching Jonathan Edwards but I kept my press-tribune television tuned to the pole vault. It was a new event at the Games and there were a dozen women — “chicks on sticks”, as the gold medal winner, Stacy Dragila, put it — each of startling and different beauty, swinging themselves 15ft in the air in a competition of accelerating drama and intensity.

Paula Radcliffe will run for Britain in the marathon: a comely woman going through all kinds of physical agonies for our benefit. Sweat will cover her, pain will cross her face in spasms, and for two-and-a-bit hours the country will watch enthralled. Patriotism, the search for victory, the knowledge of her past failings, the public row with her husband, the memory of her insuperable form of recent times, her easy, unaffected nature, her idiosyncratic head-wobble, her pared-down athlete’s body: all these things and more will be part of our experience as we watch her run and seek her destiny. Her beauty adds to the delight we take in her.

You have to be careful when talking about the beauty of athletes. You don’t want them to become Anna Kournikovas: you don’t want to value the pout above the performance. The beauty of all athletes is in the action. Khorkina is more beautiful, perhaps even more erotic, on the asymmetric bars than in Playboy.

The Olympic Games are there to be revelled in from first sip to last, vodka, juice, Tabasco and all. The Tabasco is not a guilty pleasure, still less a pornographic one. But the eroticism is a part of the Games, and good.

Ten thousand fresh, powerful, obedient bodies. Let the joy begin.

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